This Week @ NewComm: TINKERING WITH THE SOFTWARE.

Dear NewComm Community,

I hope this newsletter finds you all in good health and high spirits. It's been an eventful week here at NewComm, and I'm thrilled to share some exciting developments with you all.

As many of you know, we wrapped up a successful pilot program this summer, and we have since been working on fine-tuning our NewComm "software" to ensure that we can meet the diverse needs of the underserved learners in our community. One concept has truly captured my fascination: the idea of "design studios."

For those of you who have followed our journey, you are aware that we've always considered ourselves a "design company" creating summer programs for underserved students. In this model, adults acted as designers, crafting educational experiences for our students. However, a recent revelation sparked by Lauren Stockmon Brown , our Director of Education and Research, opened my eyes to a new perspective.

Lauren introduced me to the incredible work of NuVu High School where they transformed their classrooms into design studios. In these studios, students were empowered to leverage their education to solve real-world problems rather than simply preparing for tests. It hit me like a lightning bolt – our first program, FELLOWS, was also a design studio! Students used their literary analysis and subsequent research to solve a real community challenge.

At that moment, I realized what NewComm truly is: we are a design studio, where adults and students are both designers. I started leaning into this idea and asked myself, "What if our literacy-focused summer experiences were just the beginning of a year-long design studio journey?" In this journey, students would use what they've learned in the summer to collaboratively create tangible, impactful projects with experienced professionals. Each design studio, tailored to the summer experience, would address a critical question within our community, such as disrupting systemic economic inequalities in the South Bronx or bringing back Rwanda's truth and reconciliation process back to our community.

If we get this right, this innovative, cross-generational learning model will reimagine "the public school." It will not only enhance engagement in literacy skills development but also provide robust professional experiences. More importantly, it will empower those most affected by our unequal education system to view their engaged education as a powerful tool to shape radical futures for themselves and their communities.

I am incredibly excited about the possibilities that arise when students see themselves as more than just students but as designers working hand in hand with professionals to redesign their community. Stay tuned for more information as we continue to tinker with the "software."

Warm regards,

Chidi

Founder and CEO, NewComm PROJECT

RESOURCES THAT HAVE INFORMED OUR WORK THIS WEEK:

Radical Pedagogy: Insisting that Everyone's Presence is Acknowledged

• "In my Contemporary American Education class at a New York State Correctional Facility upstate,?I'll be teaching bell hooks' essay, "Teaching to Transgress". [...] I teach hooks and Frierie to my students, especially those who are incarcerated because education is a tool for healing and liberation. With a liberatory education, my students can direct their own paths, own their narratives, and carve out a position for themselves, despite being incarcerated. One more thing,?A liberatory education drives the one being educated to make connections between themselves, history, their personal history, and the world. These connections don’t sit dormant but command them to be agents of change in large or small ways. [...] I have never met bell hooks but she was my friend, my teacher, and my mentor. When the world - New York City - felt intolerable to me, as a woman, as a black woman, and as an immigrant, bell hooks' feminist theories, her philosophy on love, and her complete joy in education rescued me. I'm your book lover, friend, jokester, educator, and writer because of bell hooks. [...] Guess what, I did not meet bell hooks in the college classroom, but in college, a new friend told me, "Stop reading all these white men and read this woman." I ordered all of hook's books and read them instead of my assigned reading. I particularly enjoyed reading, "Selling hot pussy. A feminist challenge. Reconstructing?Black?masculinity," on the train. “When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.” - Bell Hooks? / Leslie-Ann Murray

A Non-Fiction About The Nexus Between Sport, Culture and Identity: A Book Review

• "Ellen van Neerven cleverly recalls their lived experience, touching upon the connections between sport, culture and identity. Their exploration opens with an invitation into an unapologetically cultural space that embraces the importance of relationships that matter (to them), which are, ‘one with the land and one with the people’. From the start, it’s no secret that the author has a score to settle in various aspects of their life. They are not here to serve an embellished account that attempts to combat the decolonisation of Australian sports. Instead, they present a personal offering borne from the ugly language they grew up hearing in this country. Van Neerven brings to the fore a dark Australian history associated with sports, including violent language that transcends the soccer field while concealed as coaching with words like ‘beat’, ‘flog’, ‘attack’, ‘destroy’ and others. Of most significance is the historical implications of Aboriginal people being hunted down by British elites on horseback under the league aptly titled ‘blood sports’." Dorcas Maphakela invited to take some time & learn about Aboriginal people’s stories from Aboriginal people through non-mainstream spaces. / ArtsHub

System Upgrade: Rebooting Corporate Policies For Impact

• "In the last five years, the tech industry has both soared and stumbled. We’ve seen an unprecedented wave of technical talent, including Black, Latina, and Native American women, graduate ready for the workforce. We’ve also seen companies struggle with talent retention, economic instability, and seismic shifts in how we think about work. [...] System Upgrade: Rebooting Corporate Policies for Impact?is a new report featuring groundbreaking research from Reboot Representation, conducted by?McKinsey & Company,?and in partnership with?Pivotal Ventures. It shows that investing in talent during turmoil is the smartest decision a company can make, leading to resilience and success for years to come. This isn’t just a report—it’s a practical roadmap to navigating our evolving and often difficult reality. [...]" At NewComm, we truly resonate with the idea that "It’s time for a system upgrade," and encourage you to check out this data-driven set of policies and practices that bridge the gap between the policies companies offer and the ones that keep talent thriving." / Reboot Representation

FEATURED CONTENT:

From YouTube: "Cities are not monoliths—they are made up of many, diverse neighborhoods. This neighborhood-scale often gets obscured by global or aggregate approaches to policy and economic analysis that wash over the wide range of localized responses. Scale matters; and space matters.

In her GSD lecture, Rachel Meltzer, Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics will draw on examples from her research to demonstrate how local impacts from broad-based events and interventions—what Meltzer characterizes as global shocks—can be quite uneven at the neighborhood scale. When this local variation is missed, policy and planning can be at best crude and at worst the source of persistent disparities across communities."

INSIDE NEWCOMM:

This week, Anastasia Biselli , our Communications & External Relations Manager was featured in an article by thecareersproject: environment & sustainability , a platform created by Devika Vanjani with the mission of building a community of support for international students building a career in sustainability & related fields. In the interview, Anastasia spoke about the role of a Strategic Communications Specialist and explained the way in which - working for NewComm has allowed her to access her "more creative and entrepreneurial self [...] as a way of creating actual, sustainable and systemic change...".

During this conversation, Anastasia also explained the importance of building strong relationships with mentors “who inspire you, who can help you learn and who can support you along your personal and professional journey,”?she continues by saying that "building relationships with people you look up to, and who have already done and achieved?things that resonate with you, is one of the most important things [...] to get inspired, make an impact and discover new opportunities in your industry space as well as outside of it."

Read the full article here.

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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!