Challenge Day Highlights: Economy, LT'21
To keep you connected to current issues and topics discussed in the Flagship Program, LT shares highlights and resources from our Challenge Days.
This write-up is a brief overview of the day. To get a feel for the full day, read the agenda HERE. For a list of resources related to this Challenge Day, read the prework HERE. The day was designed to support movement toward these learning outcomes:
Community and Belonging: Build strong connections among people across many lived experiences. Feel inspired and empowered to act by belonging to an enduring community of regional stewards.
Regional Challenges and Opportunities: Understand regional challenges and opportunities and how they are interconnected, including how systemic racism impedes our ability to create a healthy community for all.
Leadership: Grow skills, tools, and strategies to act as a leader and change agent in one’s own chosen area, including an ability to work within and across sectors to address systemic racism and build a more resilient and equitable region.
Many thanks to Microsoft for their sponsorship of this day and leadership in our community.
Learning Outcome: Community & Belonging
What's Your Economic Story?
In small groups, class members shared their personal economic stories to describe their pathways to their present. When sharing their stories, class members were asked to consider these prompts: What systems and community elements have benefited or burdened your economic journey? What was your family’s relationship with finances while you were growing up? What opportunities were available to you as a young adult? What tough financial trade-offs have you made?
Learning Outcome: Regional Challenges and Opportunities
Conversations on an Equitable and Inclusive Economic Recovery
Quyen Dang, Founder, FogRose Restaurant; Jaja Okigwe, President and CEO, First Choice Health; Brian Surratt, LT'07, Executive Director of Real Estate Development and Community Relations, Seattle Office of Alexandria Real Estate Equities; Jenefeness Tucker, Honorary LT, Curriculum Committee; Amberine Wilson, LT’17, Curriculum Committee; Beto Yarce, Executive Director, Ventures
The class engaged in a conversation with four leaders (Quyen Dang, Jaja Okigwe, Brian Surratt, LT'07, and Beto Yarce), discussing what an equitable and inclusive economic recovery would look like. The speakers shared their personal economic stories, including the opportunities they had (or didn't have), choices they made, and risks they took to get to their current positions. They also delved into these questions:
What does an equitable and inclusive economic recovery in our region look like?
How do we center racial justice in envisioning new possibilities for economic recovery in our region?
What actions can advance economic justice in our region on the ground in the short, medium, and longer term?
Photo: Quyen Dang, Founder, FogRose Restaurant
Photo: Brian Surratt, LT'07, Executive Director of Real Estate Development and Community Relations, Seattle Office of Alexandria Real Estate Equities
Learning Outcome: Leadership
Envisioning Economic Recovery: From Scarcity to Abundance
As part of their prework, the class read "The Gift of Strawberries" from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In small groups, the class explored the question the author posed: “How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers -- the living world could not bear our weight -- but even in a market economy, can we behave ‘as if’ the living world were a gift?”
When the class came together as a large group, they each shared one thing they're going to do in their personal or professional lives to move a part of their economic justice vision forward. Some of their commitments included:
Change from thinking of time as a commodity (production/efficiency) to time as a gift (community/relationships).
Mentor others, encourage them to reach further.
Be more involved in the conversation of tech workers vs vendors.
Expand gratitude and responsibility. Explore supply chains for the things I consume and enjoy.
Commit to supporting BIPOC-led organizations.
Explore Resource Generation (multiracial membership community of young people with wealth and/or class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power) and have a conversation with my family about it.
Consume less, acquire less stuff, and appreciate shared experiences and adventures.
Increase my donation to Real Rent Duwamish; plant all my herbs and veggies in the front yard for people to take; get chickens and share the eggs!
