GRACE Learning Village seeks to empower and heal communities of color through education and community care. As an organization committed to challenging and changing dehumanizing systems and institutions so that presently oppressed people are able to thrive, we intend to create and maintain various spaces in which young people and caring adults are active participants in their school, local, national, and global communities.
G.R.A.C.E. Learning Village School &
Neighborhood Healing Centres
GRACE Learning Village will implement and manage the GRACE Learning Village School (GLVS) model as well as the accompanying Neighborhood Healing Centres (NHC). GLVSs will consist of PreK through 12th grade educational facilities. The PreK through 12th grade educational program is rooted in Pro-Black Indigenous People of Color(BIPOC), project-based, social justice-focused curricula & pedagogies. The residential housing experience will provide nurturing spaces for youth in foster care as well as for youth whose families desire a more intensive educational experience. NHCs will empower youth and adults within the communities they are located by serving as a hub for the delivery of social services and community development programs.
About Us
Equity Declaration
GRACE Learning Village defines diversity as proportional and equitable representation of (cultural) groups within any given community and its systems and institutions.
Grace Learning Village defines inclusion as full access and participation of proportionally and equitably represented (cultural) groups within any given community and its systems and institutions.
GRACE Learning Village defines equity as fairness in the distribution of power and resources within any given community and its systems and institutions such that all individuals are empowered in ways that support their freedom of mind and body.
As such GRACE Learning Village foregrounds equity within our programs in order to realize a society in which ALL people, particularly the OPPRESSED and MARGINALIZED, are equipped with the skills to assume active roles in strengthening their community, healing our nation, and ultimately transforming the world. It has been our collective professional and lived experience that “diversity” (i.e. proportional representation) and “inclusion” (i.e. full access & participation) can be engendered & enforced without real change in the lived experiences of the oppressed and the privileged. The status quo remains intact and eventually evolves, perpetuating racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism etc.
Because they tend to be offered as surface level interventions, traditional and conventional diversity trainings don’t go deep enough in their existential ask. Equity work resulting in significant change in behavior and relationships requires focused introspection, guided evaluation and purposeful re-organization of one’s thinking about oneself and one’s actions and one’s understandings and assumptions about others.
As such, GRACE Learning Village believes that in order to engender long-lasting, life-changing, altered behavior, identity work is necessary. By identity work, we mean engaging in meaningful, intentional analysis of “who” an individual and/or organization has been, who they are currently, who they understand others to be and who they want and/or need to be in order to change their behavior in meaningful, intentional ways.
Centralizing anti-racism within an equity narrative nexus (i.e. authentic storytelling) GRACE Learning Village offers educational and community care programming, (e.g. GLV School, Neighborhood Healing Centres, Humanizing Professional Learning, etc.) that facilitates the movement of individuals demonstrating minimal equity awareness and competence toward becoming the empowered BIPOC change agents, “woke” allies and social justice co-conspirators we need to effectively challenge and eventually dismantle systems of oppression and usher in unprecedented economically, socially and politically equitable lived experiences for BIPOC.
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