Powerful Lessons from My First 100 Days at TheCaseMade

A million years ago, I was a kindergarten and first grade teacher. Well, not a million years ago. My students from my first year of teaching are now in the spring of their senior years of high school or completing their first years of college. I look at pictures of myself from back then and realize that nothing, and everything, has changed.

Here’s something interesting thing about being a teacher of young children: You learn to celebrate every milestone. Every. Single. One.

?????? You lost a tooth? Dance party!

?????? You figured out how the “bunny ears” wrap around each other on your sneakers? High fives all around!

?????? Didn’t punch out your friend for cutting in line this time? Grab yourself a prize from the “Good Citizen” box!

My students and I met every victory, big, small, or minuscule, with joy.

Perhaps my favorite shared milestone from my classroom days was the One Hundred Days of School celebration. If you’ve been anywhere near a school or learning place on the 100th day, you’ve seen the ludicrous amount of counting activities and the tiny humans dressed as centenarians using the hallways as a catwalk. It’s a bit of good fun to celebrate a date on the school year timeline—in the blah months of January or February, no less—that would otherwise go unnoticed.

More important, the 100th day of school is an opportunity to teach and talk about reflection, about taking stock of how far we have come and all that we have learned, while honoring what lies before us.

As I celebrate my First 100 Days on the team at TheCaseMade, I want to acknowledge my own progression as a Strategic CaseMaker. And I want to share how this organization is hoping to shape the ways our nation thinks about young people and prepares them for the future. Here are three of my biggest “Aha!” realizations since I joined the team, as well as some early thoughts on how The CaseMade will lean into helping youth—and the nation—get “Future Ready”:

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Choice can be a destination and a journey.

I’ve spent the last 100 days (and nights) energized by meeting the many bright, passionate, thoughtful, and courageous individuals that make up the force of “people power” we pack in this country. Folks from communities here in America and Canada (shout out to Toronto and Wood Buffalo), all learning to “work the principles” of Strategic CaseMaking? and build?their case for making sure everyone has the critical necessities and the ability to thrive.

I have spent time in conversation, learning with people deeply engaged in???? ?affordable housing, health equity, and community justice movements across this country. And one thing is certain, though it may hit folks at different moments of their CaseMaking journeys: we’re all awakening to the truth that there is a choice before us. Not between one policy or another. Or???? ?between political parties. Or???? ?even our choices of language, like whether we say, “homeless” or “houseless” when we refer to people who don’t have a stable place to live.

No, the choice we’re faced with is which path to take in creating a new tomorrow. And after listening for 100 days to some of the fiercest CaseMakers, I’m clear that while the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, we move forward by repeatedly making the same choice.

In TheCaseMade’s training cohorts, we lay out this fork in the road to every justice seeker (and future CaseMaker).

One tomorrow is met by relying on the same broken models, fatalistic thinking, and catastrophic biases.

The other offers the power of possibility and of inclusivity and prepares everyone to enjoy the future of seven generations from now. I was reminded by a partner working on climate justice that “we don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” Our work as CaseMakers is to remind people that the tomorrow we’re seeking is built today and we do that better by spending time painting the picture of the destination, not complaining about the stops along the way.

We choose one of these two tomorrows every single day (maybe several times a day when it’s hardest). I’ve watched so many of my fellow CaseMakers wrestle (as I often do) with the act of choosing a better tomorrow—even though that’s what we all want!

Sometimes it feels so much easier to keep going the same way, to keep that same (tired, negative) energy. CaseMaking is about shifting the energy through our choices and, ultimately, making a justice-filled tomorrow possible.

Once-in-a-lifetime events create once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

The global pandemic hit us four years ago—and we’re still grappling with the ways we emerged both broken and better. I’ll never forget the day the world seemed to stop spinning and things as I knew them came to a grinding halt.

As a public education advocate in Kansas City at the time, my work was building a chorus of powerful voices, united in wanting a public education ecosystem that could serve all our kids well. I remember thinking, “How am I supposed to build community partnerships if I can’t leave my house?”

I felt small and, most of all, powerless to affect anything. As a parent, I worried that my daughter would never learn anything past 7th grade if I oversaw teaching and learning from home that year. We felt confused and helpless. And then, I watched our home, my city, the country, and the world do what seemed impossible in those early days: keep moving forward.?

Suddenly, we were doing the hard thing every day and rediscovering our power and our intention. I watched in awe as my school district took on the herculean task of making sure students were fed, no matter where they learned. I know that undertaking wasn’t in the district’s 2019-2020 strategic plan because I helped write it! Because of the myriad ways administrators, teachers, and staff met the moment beautifully then, I have confidence they can meet the urgency of this moment: helping students recover from pandemic-related learning loss using the same innovation and focus on student and family experience that they applied four years ago.

Over the last 100 days, I’ve observed that there is a tension between actually solving a technical challenges (“better literacy scores” or “more affordable housing units”) and acknowledging that the capacity to implement the solution might already exist. From Greensboro to Austin, whether folks are working on inclusive main street development or wraparound social services, it is really tough to “walk and chew gum,” to feel the weight of planning for change while proudly sharing communal triumphs found in the most unlikely places. The CaseMakers I’ve met these last months, they dig in harder to the plans, the process, and the tactics and rarely look up to celebrate the power and the successes all around them. And then, over time, they can forget that the power and success ever existed.

What’s clearer to me today than ever before is that, sometimes, we need to be talked back into our individual and collective power. And most days, my work at The Case Made is holding up a mirror when asked, “How will we ever figure this out?” I am grateful to be the sticky note at the edge of the computer, reminding my fellow CaseMakers that we are still the same people, organizations, agencies, and communities that moved boulders uphill every day to care for our neighbors during a horrific global pandemic. The challenges we’re facing head on today are just another opportunity to tap back into that source of strength and to be the power we wish to see in the world.

When you know better, you do better and then you can get better.

Perhaps, the most challenging part of doing anything new is unlearning old behaviors and finding success in new places. Across my career, I’d gotten really good at using data as a hammer that drove home a crisis and not a flashlight that illuminated the solution. I made the challenging things I noticed about our education system the scariest bedtime story I could tell. Bad-news data became the language and currency of my approach to change.

Reading my (now worn, dog-eared, and heavily highlighted) copy of Case Made! for the first time over a year ago, I took a first powerful step toward a different way of building will for systemic change. I recognized that I was spending all my time making victims of powerful children or villainizing specific adults who didn’t act in the way I expected or with the urgency I demanded. I left zero time to talk about the actual solutions.

One hundred days in, I realize that, regardless of the system, the hardest part is getting out of our own way and letting solutions speak for themselves. I understand that foregrounding solutions doesn’t diminish the challenge or the urgency of the problems we’re solving for. I used so much precious energy mastering the science of critique and the art of the complaint that I rarely left room to foster collective hope and ownership in the solutions I was proposing.

I needed Strategic CaseMaking? far more than it needed me. I think we all do—from organizers to CEOs, classroom teachers to elected officials, small agencies to the federal government. Our heart may be for justice and positive change, but if our words don’t mirror that hope, we’re just whispering softly in a thunderstorm.

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With these three lessons in mind, I’m turning to my next 100 days. One of the things I’ve heard from you is that no matter the justice community we are a part of, there is a deep need to put thought and energy toward building up systems that support our young people so the future ahead of them is the future of their wildest dreams.

TheCaseMade heard the call, and we’re launching a new pillar of work we call Future Ready. We see so much opportunity to build a strategy at the intersection of youth experiences and systems change. So often, change efforts focus solely on young people’s education or their workforce potential, narrowly defining the ways children and youth grow and learn. We are often short-sighted, not seeing our youngest citizens as multi-dimensional “whole” beings. Young people are affected by all the systems that impact their elders, from the economy to housing and health care to our democracy.

At TheCaseMade, we’ve got years of experience making the case for systems change in fields like poverty alleviation and housing and health equity. Now, we want to use that expertise to pinpoint ways justice leaders across the country can build will for solutions that will change the lives of children and youth.

Knowing I’ll spend at least the next one hundred days working to build the leadership capacity of key organizations, agencies, coalitions, and everyday people who want to bring on more and more allies to create a better future for our kids—it makes me want to celebrate! The joy I felt so many years ago for my students—doing a shimmy when someone lost her baby tooth or ate his green vegetables—is the same excitement I feel today about working with people like you. Grab the juice box, open up your favorite story time book, and join me. On the long road to justice, we’ve got to celebrate every win and every lesson learned.????

So if you are a leader, organization, agency or coalition working to shape systems that allow young people to live into their dreams, send me an email, a private message or a carrier pigeon…we’re here to help!??????