Reflecting on our year, 2023!

This year was a time of settling into our new, lateral leadership team made up of Jose Rivas, Kiarra Ambrose, and Cyrah Dardas. We have learned so much about each other, our rhythms and each of our artistic practices that guide so much of our work. Each of us have come to this role with our own life experience grounded in pursuit of humanizing learning in Detroit. We are learning the breadth of our roles as a core team of Executive Directors, developing new programs for learners in Detroit and hosting community offerings. We are deepening our understanding of cooperative leadership, holding of power and expression of liberatory learning. 

PIE held the 3rd installment of Radical wellness this summer, a transformative and healing space for education leaders that supported their development of more human-centered learning spaces and lives. During our 8 months together, we explored questions like: What does radical wellness mean for education spaces? And what can leaders do to support individual and collective healing and wellness?

Leaders walked away with practical resources and strategies that provided guidance both individually and collectively on working towards wholeness. One participant shared that Radical Wellness gave her an opportunity to “Finally think about herself”.  She went on to share that, so many times in service and leadership positions the focus is on outcomes and not on relationships. She explained that her experience in Radical Wellness allowed her to shift her focus to her own wellbeing, which resulted in her being more attune to the wellbeing of those around her. After having attended our fellowship, many of our leaders committed to using what they learned by continuing to develop personal practices of centering and physical movement to connect to self. 

““I will go into my educating spaces more mindful of the human needs of my students (and myself).”
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— - Jim Dwyer

Jose launched PIE Coffee Break a restful time for teachers to be in community and recharge. Hoping to expand on this work teachers will be invited to use these sessions as a time to re-engage with their purpose. These spaces will hold cohort meet-ups once the PIE Institute (Formerly the RIDA Institute) launches in the summer. This summer intensive is meant to engage teachers seeking to humanize their learning space as well as dedicating their purpose for the school year in a cohort of like minded teachers supporting one another. 

This year we had the honor of partnering with teaching artist Maya Davis to host Community As Medicine which  supports Detroit educators of color, through facilitated dinners for educators to connect and build community to process their experiences while collectively cultivating a network of support. The pandemic made clear that educators and youth with strong networks of support were the most resilient and this initiative is a direct response to supporting educators and youth to develop these deep and powerful connections.

To archive the findings of this project,  PIE Published a book documenting Community As Medicine with support from our community partner and dear friends at BULK space and we were even invited to sell our book at the 2023 Detroit Book Fair.

We are thrilled to have deepened in partnership and relationship with many values-aligned artists, educators, youth and non-institutional learning spaces this year and look forward to continuing to build upon the foundations of trust and play that were forged in 2023. Thank you all for your continued support and we look forward to sharing more about our exciting upcoming community offerings in 2024!

Community As Medicine

Re-Imagining our learning landscape together

“Re-Imagining our learning landscape together
“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us”

”

— Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Community As Medicine launched in October of 2022 with the intent to support early career educators, specifically of color in Detroit. The program uses dinners centered on connection and building community with one another to collectively cultivate a network of support to nurture new visions for Detroit’s learning landscape. For this work, educators need to be able to access their imagination to seek out possibility. 

We know that teachers who are exhausted and dysregulated by the violence, hopelessness and abandonment they are faced with on a daily basis are not likely to be able to move towards possibility. Our goal is to deepen our support of the individuals that make up the education system, resourcing students, leadership and educators in schools. 

In our project, Community As Medicine we host a series of monthly meals, where each portion  of the meal is carefully considered, allowing educators to forge relationships. Our first cohort of educators focused on educators in the early stages of their career. The members of our first cohort were selected for their commitment to humanizing learning as well as their commitment to being innovative in their  approach to their role as educators. The meals are set in the warmth of a home or garden decorated to commemorate the time of year with flowers, hand dyed linens and artful table setting. Each meal is catered by a local BIPOC chef whose cooking practice intertwines with food sovereignty. Invitee’s are given Care Kits whose contents guide the night's conversation with art, poems from local writers and books that provide access to further study. After years of learning from supporting teachers we have learned that when people feel tended to and cherished for their participation and presence it invites them to begin to process their experiences and this leads to relationship building.  With this project we intend to articulate that we understanding that being an educator is a rigorous practice and requires this depth of tending to cultivate growth and retention.

Through these dinners we have invited each other to think about the ways we as educators and learners utilize imagination to re-shape the systems of our circumstances to better serve our students and ourselves. We are deeply grateful for our loving community partners BULK Space and Ceramic School who have generously offered us space, and thought partnership. We are so thankful to each of the participants who bring us their stories, and insights onto how we are holding ourselves and caring for each other as People in education at this time. 

Welcome People In Education’s New Leadership Team!

From left to right: José Rivas, Kiarra Ambrose, Cyrah Dardas

In the continued evolution of PIE, we are excited to introduce our new leadership team! This fall, we welcomed Kiarra Ambrose, Cyrah Dardas and Jose Rivas to serve as our Leadership Team! 

Last year as PIE prepared for a leadership transition, we reinvisioned leadership roles and positions. Moving away from a single Director, towards a team in hopes of building a supportive and collaborative structure. This leadership team is made up of people who have long standing commitments to PIE and our mission to humanizing learning. 

Kiarra is an educator committed to creating brave spaces to explore what it means to learn in community. A native Detroiter, Kiarra has been an educator in the city for over 15 years, becoming a Master Teacher and Training and Support Coordinator within Detroit Public School Community District in 2019. She has also served as PIE’s facilitation fellow since 2020, co-leading the Rida Institute.

Cyrah, a Dearborn native, interdisciplinary Artist and Care Worker who has a longstanding commitment to creating third spaces with and for young people to access liberation through an art making practice. Cyrah brings over 12 years of experience offering these spaces within and out of school in Detroit. Cyrah has been a vital part of the PIE team for five years, and has led a reimagining of our arts education work since 2020 as our lead teaching artist. 

José is an educator with more than 15 years of experience working in Detroit, who is committed to fostering deeper connections for young people and educators to engage in personal growth in mathematics classrooms and creative learning spaces. José is also a poet and writer, which led him to become a program lead at 826 Michigan where he supported literacy programming for Detroit youth. Most recently, José was working as a master teacher in Detroit Public Schools Community District.

““We are developing leadership from the communities we work in and with. So often new leaders, especially leaders of color/people of culture are brought into their role with no support - this leadership form hopes to support them in the structure - it’s not a silver bullet but an acknowledgment of interconnectedness in holding power.”

”

— Nate Mullen

Collaboration and Structure

We see this new leadership team as commitment to investing in new ways of holding leadership as an organization. This new structure allows PIE to build and support a leadership team made up of people from Detroit, People of color and from communities we work with. 

Each member of the Leadership Team has an internal and an external facing role. Kiarra will lead our Leadership Education work and work as Director of Internal Team/ People. José will lead Teacher Education as well as Finance. Cyrah will continue to lead Art Education and lead PIE’s Communications. Allowing each team member to contribute to both programming and operations, our hope is that it will develop into a well rounded team with deep expertise and experience of the public work of programs and the not so visible internal workings of the organization. Our past Directors, Siobhan O’Laoire and Nate Mullen will continue to support and coach the team and PIE.

Please join us in welcoming this new leadership team! We are beyond excited for y’all to get to meet this teamAnd you will, as they share over the coming months their vision and plan for the next phases of PIE’s work.

In the meantime, you can check out our latest offerings, as we recently launched our second round of Radical Wellness as well as a new arts education dinner series Community as Medicine.