By Director of Teaching and Learning Ilsa Dohmen, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Gulliver LaValle, and Director of the Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship Annie Makela
With the Hub construction well underway, a number of physical locations moved and morphed this summer, and one location was added: The Equity and Impact Lab. Created by Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Gulliver LaValle, along with Scott Center Founding Director, Annie Makela, and Director of Teaching and Learning, Ilsa Dohmen, the Equity and Impact Lab houses and showcases the school’s commitment to core Hillbrook values—equity and inclusion, reaching beyond, social impact, lifelong learning and being our best.
We invite you to visit this new community space for teaching, finding resources, collaborating, and showcasing Hillbrook initiatives. One thing you might see there is a gathering space for student and employee groups, such as People of Color at Hillbrook (PoCaH, an employee affinity group) and Helping Everyone Reach Out (HERO, a middle school student club). These groups use the Equity and Impact Lab as a sanctuary to ground challenging discussions and plan for how we each live the school’s commitments to inclusivity. Having a dedicated meeting space that embodies the values of these groups in a visual array of student work, expert resources, and thematic posters remind us of Hillbrook’s commitment to supporting these initiatives and allows the groups to leave traces on the walls, sharing their work with others.
The Equity and Impact Lab is also home base for a number of classes and clubs led by the Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship. You might find a Middle School Reach Beyond Block group meeting here, to learn about aquaponics and the future of sustainable farming, or micro-culture explorations of nearby communities through food. Or you might find a group of Lower School Reach Beyond students learning about global communities through short videos filmed around the world, or making plans for lower school social impact initiatives. When you visit you can see many 8th graders’ written responses to the prompts, “What matters to you and what are you doing about it?” along with some faculty and staff responses. We invite you to visit the “What Matters to Me” wall and leave a postcard sharing your own responses to these core questions.
The Equity and Impact Lab is also a great place to explore resources, including an array of adult and children’s books around themes like kindness, agency, immigration, design, gender expression, destigmatizing mental health, entrepreneurs from around the world, and identity development. Read, borrow or take photos of the offerings in our two libraries, or suggest a resource that has helped you learn! We are working to create a way to leave traces for other readers about ways the books on these shelves have shaped us, so we can make visible connections to our learning.
Finally, the Equity and Impact Lab is a great place to share your own work and see the work of others around equity and impact on people or planet. You can visit the wall to see “Ways we are reaching beyond” and read captions to see how others around school are making a difference. Leave your own caption or photo as we help build out this living testament to our community’s work.
The space is best experienced in person and we encourage folks to come by. The curation of the space is evolving and on-going. We hope you will take time to peruse our resource libraries with books, both fiction and nonfiction options, focused on DEI and Social Impact. In addition, our walls are plastered with student work, photos and captions from recent student experiences in Reach Beyond Block, DEI focused student clubs and Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship projects. If you haven’t already, we hope you might fill out a “What Matters to Me” Scott Center postcard to help us share stories from our community in this space and on the Scott Center social media sites. There is also a place to make suggestions for future changemakers to be featured and researched. We also hope you will share suggestions for books we might add to our resource library.
Learn and Borrow:
- Read, borrow or take photos of our list of adult-facing and children’s books that feature topics like understand gender expression, conversations destigmatizing mental health, stories of low socioeconomic status entrepreneurs.
- We also offer examples of children’s books with themes like kindness; agency, including ways very young children can make a difference; celebrating differences in gender identity and expression; stories of immigrant families and how they navigate the transition; how to use what you have to design ways to play around the world; how humans of all ages take care of the planet and animals around them; language connections/cultural identity; finance ideas for kids.
Contribute:
- Add a photo or caption of you and your family reaching beyond to our board
- Fill out a “What Matters to Me” postcard and share it on our wall
See traces of our work on-campus by:
- Reading student-produced flyers that advocate for organizations that matter to them
- Reading the PoCah Affinity group mission and guiding principles
- See photos of students and adults in action as they reach beyond to make a difference
We remain most excited by the work that is designed and done by students. Hillbrook students continuously find ways to be their best and take risks by sharing with us through many forms, what matters to them and what they are doing about it. We know ideas turn to impact when we continue to put student engagement and agency at the center of work. When curating and designing the Equity and Impact Lab we prioritized the ability to make the space accessible for many different kinds of collaborations.
We are hopeful that the space continues to evolve and that the community collaborates with us to find new ways to showcase our best as we continuously grow. We see this space as a living lab that is always expressing kindness, risk-taking, and curiosity while also representing the growth mindset we ask our community to embrace. Welcome to the Equity and Impact Lab, Hillbrook!