MSAN Inspires Students to Organize Forum on Race
April 17, 2013
Students from across Dane County gathered at MSAN's National Student Conference
Inspired to be agents of change in their communities, eight students at Verona Area High School hosted hundreds of their peers from around Dane County for a two-day conference on April 8 and 9 featuring renowned educator Calvin Terrell.
On April 8, Terrell facilitated a discussion on racial healing and justice amongst student leaders from Verona, Middleton-Cross Plains, DeForest, McFarland, Stoughton, Waunakee, Madison, Monona-Grove, Waterloo, and Sun Prairie at Verona Area High School. On April 9, also in Verona, Terrell delivered a keynote address to hundreds of students from across Dane County, followed by conversational workshops managed by the student leaders who had been trained the previous day.
The evening of April 9, Terrell and many of the students he had interacted with over the past two days hosted a community forum at the Allied Community Center in Fitchburg. Members of the public, educators from several school districts, and Madison Mayor Paul Soglin attended the event, which sought to improve diversity awareness and communication about racial equity and the overall education climate in Dane County.
Calvin Terrell urged the audience to strive to improve their communities.
“Madison seems to be a very liberal community and open and receptive, but that can sometimes be dangerous because there’s the idea of being beyond these conversations, where there’s a belief of tolerating each other and getting along, whereas in reality there’s still these heaping, huge gaps in society,” Terrell said.
Terrell, a former assistant director of the National Conference for Community Justice/Anytown USA Arizona Region, is the founder of Social Centric, an organization providing education and training to enhance human interactions and global progress. More information on him can be found at www.CalvinTerrell.com.
Terrell was recruited by the Verona students who attended the Minority Student Achievement Network’s Annual Student Conference in Phoenix in October 2012. Terrell was a speaker at the MSAN conference, and the Verona students believed his message of empowering youth to create safe spaces in high school communities would be important to share with their peers across Dane County. Over the fall and winter, they raised the funds to bring Terrell to Verona for the event.
MSAN Executive Director Madeline Hafner informed attendees about college scholarships.
“These students felt so impassioned by the message they received at the MSAN Student Conference in Phoenix that they committed themselves to making this event happen, even though it wasn’t an easy thing to pull off,” said MSAN Director Madeline Hafner. “I think we make so many assumptions about what young people can’t do that it stands in the way of what they can do.”
Terrell’s call for peace and understanding resonated with the diverse and energetic crowd of high school students partly due to his “infectious magnetism,” said Verona Area School District Superintendent Dean Gorrell.
“Calvin has a way of opening up a worldview to students that lets them see that change is possible if they work for it,” Gorrell said. “As more and more of us inhabit this planet, we need to figure out how we’re going to learn to get along with one another, so that we’re not killing each other. I believe that the young people of today have not only the key to it, but they’ll have the duty of it going forward. So why not give them opportunities to explore that now so that 10 or 15 years from now, when we are voting for them, they will have as much of a social conscience as possible.”
Terrell said he sought to empower the young people gathered at the event to make change and create a better world.
“The biggest thing is getting people to realize that they have the power to be protagonists in their own lives,” he said. “People oftentimes have been conditioned to a culture of passivity, and they don’t realize they have the capacity to transform their community, transform their institutions, transform systems.”
Even if the conference produces no long-term results, Terrell said, it still will have been a success.
“These youth felt empowered to say, ‘This is what our community needs. This is what we want to do,’ and they were relentless in the pursuit of the process of creating this event,” Terrell said. “For this to come to fruition, that just speaks to the overarching goal of empowerment.”
