This Week @ NewComm: A DREAM COME TRUE

Dear NewComm Community,

I am thrilled to announce that our pilot program, NewComm FELLOWS, is set to launch this Monday! After more than a year of meticulous planning, it is incredibly exciting to see this dream become a reality. We are filled with anticipation and cannot wait to embark on this incredible journey together.

To capture and share the essence of our summer program, we will be documenting the entire experience through video content. We hope to provide weekly vlog updates, allowing you to stay connected and engaged with the remarkable progress of our NewComm FELLOWS. Make sure to stay tuned and immerse yourself in the inspiring stories and accomplishments of our talented participants.

In other exciting news, we can now officially announce that our pilot project, LAB*, our upcoming Spring social impact retreat for high school students, is being generously funded by Science Sandbox—an initiative of the Simons Foundation. This is an incredible honor for us, as it recognizes the importance and potential impact of our work.

Set in the beautiful city of Syracuse, NY, our inaugural theme for LAB* will be "FACE THE SUN." This theme pays homage to the upcoming total eclipse that will grace the region during our retreat in 2024. Our Fellows will have the unique opportunity to explore the interplay of light and darkness in both physical and metaphorical spaces. To guide their exploration, we have selected Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, Life on Mars as the foundational text. We are eager to witness the profound insights and creative expressions that will emerge from this exploration.

At our core, we are committed to leveraging BIPOC storytelling as a powerful research and design tool. This commitment drives us to continually explore new and innovative ways to empower diverse voices and narratives. We firmly believe that the richness of these stories holds immense value for our collective growth and understanding. Stay tuned for more updates on this program as we progress further!

Lastly, I want to take a moment to highlight The Futures Fund, our fundraising initiative that aims to provide students from under-resourced communities with the opportunity to participate in our upcoming travel program, FUTURES. Through FUTURES, students will journey abroad to Kigali, Rwanda, where they will experience firsthand the transformative power of grassroots innovation that starts person-to-person, neighbor-to-neighbor. By supporting The Futures Fund, you can help us ensure that deserving students have access to these life-changing opportunities.

We are truly grateful for your ongoing support and enthusiasm. Together, we are building a vibrant community that values transformational education opportunities.

Warmest regards,

Chidi

Founder and CEO, NewComm PROJECT

RESOURCES THAT HAVE INFORMED OUR WORK THIS WEEK:

Jackson’s Dissent Decries Affirmative Action Decision As ‘Tragedy For Us All’

• "Jackson opened her dissent by noting the “gulf-sized race-based gaps” that continue to exist in American society — ones created “in the distant past” but passed down through generations. By restricting the use of race in admissions decisions, she said, the Supreme Court was detaching itself from the country’s actual past and present experiences. [...] “No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” Jackson wrote, adding that, “Colleges being required to ignore race, would not make the issue go away — and would in fact make race matter even more and prolong the problem of racism”." / Washington Post

Increasing Representation of Historically Underrepresented Students: NAACP Launches ‘Diversity No Matter What’ Pledge

• "The NAACP calls on more than 1,600 U.S. public and private colleges and universities with selective admissions processes to commit to the "Diversity No Matter What" pledge following the Supreme Court's extreme decisions reversing decades of precedent on affirmative action. The Pledge is an effort to ensure that higher education institutions foster environments mirroring the nation's diversity and increase the representation of historically underrepresented students. "Let's be clear - Black America is in a fight for our lives. The NAACP has been at the forefront of this battle for more than a century and we're not backing down," said?NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson. "It is our hope that our nation's institutions will stand with us in embracing diversity, no matter what. Regardless, the NAACP will continue to advocate, litigate, and mobilize to ensure that every Black American has access to the resources and opportunities they need to thrive." The NAACP has long advocated for policies and regulations at every level of government to guarantee a first-rate education for all Black students." / NAACP

The Process Of Decolonizing Who Can Hold And Produce Knowledge

• "Obsolete strategies to Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL) have worked to erase the voice of girls, women, Indigenous people, LGBTQI+ (and other marginalised groups) from the history of social change. Although there have been a number of alternative approaches and frameworks proposed in academic literature these remain on the periphery when it comes to their practical application in the global south. Despite resistance from social movements, mainstream funders tend to continue to impose multiple regimental reporting and data requirements on grantee partners to justify being funded. These practices still mirror implicit subordinate power relations of donor and grantee and need to change. In this article, we take a practical?transnational feminist?approach to MEL. We reflect on actions that philanthropy can take and has begun to take to decolonize practices, policies and resource flows, and support transformation in relationships and power dynamics offering possibilities of creative and innovative approaches. [...] MEL has for too long reinforced harmful power dynamics, upheld false narratives of who can hold and produce knowledge, and in turn, has robbed us and social justice movements of the knowledge needed to catalyse change, hold the line and sustain movements." / Alliance Magazine

Nonprofits as Battlegrounds for Democracy: Ensuring That Everyone Can Fully Participate

• "It’s not often that a body of work comes along that makes us ask big questions about the nonprofit sector. Claire Dunning’s new book,?Nonprofit Neighborhoods, is one. In it, she anchors the sector to one key observation: it was created to offset demands for democracy, particularly by people of color. And that is one big indictment. Dunning makes the case that using nonprofits as a “tool for addressing urban problems” has led to a form of “urban governance” that uses private organizations to fulfill public, democratic rights. She writes, “The formal engagement of neighborhood-based nonprofits in urban governance constitutes one of the most profound, if hidden, transformations in the United States over the second half of the twentieth century.” As neighborhoods nonprofits mediated, for some, access to public goods and services, participation, and representation, they also facilitated a form of privatized inclusion, simultaneously making urban governance more decentralized, diverse, and participatory, and more insulated from the structural changes African Americans and Latinx residents had been calling for." / Non Profit Quarterly

FEATURED CONTENT:

From Youtube: "ArchDaily met with Lesley Lokko, curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale to discuss the main themes of this edition, her first impressions as well as making space for voices that historically haven’t been heard in architectural exhibitions."

INSIDE NEWCOMM:

I am thrilled to introduce our newest team member, Ekaterina Zapletina , who will be joining us as our Documentarian this summer. With her extensive experience as a journalist, literary and film scholar, and documentary filmmaker, she is the perfect choice to visually capture our story this summer.

Hailing from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, Katya has studied at both Lomonosov Moscow State University and Charles University in Prague, specializing in literary criticism. Additionally, she recently completed her studies in Documentary Media Studies at The New School in New York City, refining her videography skills and expanding her knowledge in the field.

During the period from 2019 to 2022, Katya worked with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, immersing herself in the human rights issues prevalent in the former USSR countries. This experience has profoundly shaped her perspective and instilled in her a deep commitment to amplifying marginalized voices and shedding light on crucial social issues.

With Katya's exceptional talent, dedication, and strong passion for documentary filmmaking, I am confident that she will make an extraordinary contribution to our team and our mission. Her unique background and expertise will undoubtedly enrich our projects and help us create impactful content that resonates with our audience.

HOW TO JOIN IN

Donate!

Email Us

Meet with our Founder, Chidi!

Thank you for reading! Feel free to reach out to us?HERE?if you have any questions. We would love to hear from you. We’ll see you again next week!