17TH ANNUAL BISSELL GROGAN SYMPOSIUM

Virtual Speaker Series: Resiliency in a Time of Change

This year’s speaker series explores the concept of resilience during challenging times through the lenses of race and social justice, climate and the environment, and how the arts and creativity have managed to pivot and thrive. “In the upcoming months, our speakers will share topics designed to make you think critically about how your individual actions can help have a positive impact on the world in which we live,” said symposium namesake Kennie Grogan ’76. “As a school that develops lifelong learners who are informed, engaged, and ethical citizens, we hope you find the entire symposium inspiring and that you will feel empowered to live out our mission.”

JANUARY 19

CAROLYN CHOU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE ASIAN AMERICAN RESOURCE WORKSHOP (AARW)

FROM STOPPING ASIAN HATE TO BUILDING ASIAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY VOICE INTRODUCED BY: HEBE QIANG ’23, GLOBAL STUDIES DIPLOMA PROGRAM, CO-PRESIDENT OF THE AAPI STUDENT CLUB

Carolyn Chou advocates tirelessly for the Pan-Asian communities in Greater Boston as executive director of the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), a member-led organization committed to building grassroots power through political education, creative expression, and issuebased and neighborhood organizing. The rise of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic has shown a real need for education, change, and action. So how can we better understand the issues impacting Asian American communities and work together to make sure that those most impacted are at the center of our efforts?

“Asian American communities are diverse and include a wide range of class experiences, languages, and gendered experiences,” she explained. “My organization is focused on bringing people together to build something better than any one voice or idea could.” After coming to Boston for college, Carolyn worked in Dorchester, where she lives today, in afterschool and summer programs for youth. She noticed how much race, class, and gender mattered to the families working and living in this neighborhood. “I really got invested in Dorchester as a community,” she said. “In supporting others, I could see that I was helping to build leadership in the community, too.”

My organization is focused on bringing people together to build something better than any one ’’ voice or idea could.

Carolyn shared with students the idea that racism, and oppression in general, functions at many levels. On an ideological or cultural level, it makes up one’s belief system – one that is maintained at an institutional level by laws and public policy. At an interpersonal level, the idea that one group is better than another becomes internalized. Challenging students, she asked, “How do we unlearn what is internalized?”

According to Carolyn, it starts with understanding how Asian Americans are seen. Speaking from experience, she shared that Asian Americans are typically racialized in two ways: as the model minority, a concept created to pit people of color against one another, and as the perpetual foreigner, those “not from here.” By presenting key moments in history that trace anti-Asian violence back to the mid-1800s, she shared the historical context that leads to what we read about today. “A passage about civil disobedience in 1887 could be mistaken for one from two years ago,” she noted. “This is the legacy of people coming together to make change for their very survival.”

In sharing the important work of AARW, Carolyn described a coming together of staff and volunteers to crowdsource support using their immigration and deportation work as an example. “By helping connect residents with much-needed legal resources, we help lift up their important stories to be heard, and we advocate with legislators for their support,” she explained. “We fight for these cases because our success impacts everyone,” she said. “We can change the system, and we can change the narrative.”

Their housing justice work is a direct reflection of their vision for building stronger, safer communities, as is their civic engagement/voting rights work. She pointed out that basic ideas such as bilingual ballots can lead to civic participation that directly impacts the bigger issues at stake. It is a clear reminder for students that we can all bring something to the table to make the world a better place. “We don’t all want or need the same thing, but how can we come together and realize that what is best for others is better for all of us?” she asked. “We have to build together. We can’t support solutions that harm other people of color. We must show up for one another and support one another.”

In closing, she shared three key lessons (at right) as well as a tree analogy to acknowledge the work ahead. “If the roots of the tree are the systems, then the branches and leaves reflect how they show up. We know we need to change the systems, but we also need to know that they show up differently across marginalized groups.” She also reminded students that there are many ways to get involved. “Volunteer with a nonprofit or become an intern at a grassroots organization. Knocking on doors and talking to people in their homes helps to ground this work,” she said.

WE WELCOMED CAROLYN CHOU TO CAMPUS IN FEBRUARY to meet with students in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Club during lunch and assembly block. She answered student questions, spoke more about her work as a community organizer, shared her experiences as a woman who identifies as part of the AAPI community, and helped students think about ways to do their own advocacy work.

FEBRUARY 9

CALEB STRATTON, CHIEF RESILIENCE OFFICER, CITY OF HOBOKEN STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE RESILIENCY IN OUR MUNICIPALITIES

From devastating wildfires to unprecedented rainfall and floods, we are already experiencing the dire effects of climate change. We are at a global tipping point for our future, and climate action is needed now. Brimmer welcomed keynote speaker Caleb Stratton to our Bissell Grogan Symposium Speaker Series to share how he addresses the climate crisis every day in his work and to give students insight into managing uncertainty and finding hope, even as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Originally interested in pursuing a career in engineering, Stratton pivoted to studying urban planning early on in college due to a scheduling conflict. He quickly began to appreciate a career path focused on helping societies develop in a way that improves the health of its constituents. After graduating, he landed an internship in upstate New York learning how to create a sense of place centered on a human scale, not an architectural scale – think walkable, bikeable city centers that are not dependent on automobiles. “In both study and practice, we hoped to move past a dependence on fossil fuels,” he explained.

It was a subsequent formative project with GlobalFoundries, a global shipping investment firm, that exposed him to a new level of complexity in building design and convinced him to pursue graduate school. “The Spitzer School of Architecture in New York City really broke me out of my urban planning mindset and shifted it to systems thinking and how architecture relates to climate change,” he remembers. Not long thereafter, Stratton moved to Hoboken, NJ, to focus on sustainability in municipal government.

Often asked what a chief resilience officer does day to day, Stratton said it is a role that emerged from the Rockefeller Foundation immediately after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one that organizes collective efforts and finances around climate-related events. Working with a team of public and private stakeholders, including architects, web designers, meeting moderators, environmental specialists, and lawyers, Stratton identifies shocks and stressors in the system daily. “There are so many opportunities for resiliency and overcoming challenges in this role,” he said. “And the pandemic really shifted the dynamic of the work environment. Adaptation is a key tenet of resiliency.”

Adaptation is a key tenet of resiliency.

One of the things Stratton loves most about his job is the myriad ways in which he engages with the public, and they are not all city planners. “I work with building architects on construction and landscape architects on plant tolerance. I bring in engineers to help me understand the physics involved, urban planners to focus on zoning, and urban designers to show me how potential buildings interact with the cityscape,” he shared. “I recently worked on curriculum development for a middle school.”

Currently an adjunct professor at Spitzer teaching flood plain management, Stratton shared the history of Hoboken with our students, including changes in its waterfront over the last 150 years. “While the development of communities and water standards has led to increased access and a vibrant waterfront community, 75% of Hoboken is vulnerable to storm surge events,” he explained. “Hurricane Sandy was the worst event our city had ever experienced. Sea levels are rising and so are our vulnerabilities.”

During the Q&A session, we asked if Stratton had any advice for students interested in advocating for environmental change. He stressed the importance of getting involved with organizations at the city level that encourage teen participation. Community Emergency Response Team was one such example. “When students look to local government for ideas that can grow into national solutions, it’s a way for them to have a real impact,” he said.

In closing, when asked how far we have come in the past decade, Stratton’s response was hopeful. “Hoboken is ten years ahead of the curve, but Boston is catching up. The city of Boston has a CRO on board and they are focused on these same issues and practices. I’m very optimistic for the future.”

MARCH 2

LIZA ZAYAS (LUNA DEL FLOR), SPOKEN WORD POET THE RESILIENCY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT EXPERIENCED THROUGH POETRY

Vibrant poet Liza Zayas joined us on campus to inspire and encourage our students to delve into their inner writer and appreciate the creativity and honesty that unlocks when they do. Zayas began writing at an early age. “In writing, there is release,” she said. “You are struck by inspiration, and you must write it down!” What began as simplistic rhymes and songwriting later turned into poetry inspired by her Puerto Rican roots, life’s challenges, and her quest for justice and equity. “It’s my walk and my talk.”

Zayas treated the audience to a reading of three commissioned works, including “Huntress,” a poem commissioned for International Women’s Day and dedicated to her grandmother. She followed that with a reading of “Descendants of Genocidal Colonization,” written for an Afro-Latinx event and celebrating the cultures of both Latin America and Africa while also addressing the prejudice of colorism. She also shared a personal piece entitled “You are Real,” written to give voice to the experience of depression. “We often feel like we must be masked and hide our pain,” she explained. “We aren’t trained to hold one another in that space and simply ask, How can I help?”

When asked about her artistic process, Zayas confessed to doing her best work at dawn. “Most of my pieces are birthed during sunrise,” she shared, “I then reread, revise, reread, and revise again, trying always to maintain the same emotion and excitement of my first draft.” Her hope is always to create work that brings others in, regardless of the topic, and allows people to digest issues that are often difficult to discuss. A student asked if writing has a greater purpose, and Zayas shared that the experience is one’s own. “When you are doing something that feels purposeful to you, it feels easy and energetic,” she said. Whether she is writing commissioned pieces or personal pieces, she finds that writing brings her great joy. “Everyone has a God spark, and when you create something, it becomes a part of you… it has a life.”

In a powerful closing moment, Zayas had the audience repeat her three favorite assertions: I am powerful. We are united. We are never alone.

When you are doing something that feels purposeful to you, it feels easy and energetic.

MARCH 10

ROSS GAY, AUTHOR & POET. THE ROLE OF THE WRITTEN WORD IN CHALLENGING TIMES

Author and poet Ross Gay closed out our speaker series with a beautiful reading of “We Kin,” an essay from his book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, that he read aloud for the very first time with our students. He described his book as “a sustained meditation on that which goes away – loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it – that tries to find solace and resilience in the processes of the garden and the orchard. These are poems that study the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all – death, sorrow, loss – is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.”

A 2015 nominee for the National Book Award for Poetry, Gay also teaches both undergraduate and graduate students at Indiana University. Prior to his keynote, Gay held a 90-minute poetry workshop with Upper School English students where he helped them with their writing prompts. “The challenge with teaching during a pandemic has been figuring out how to maintain the kind of energy that comes from being together in a classroom. I encourage my own students to collaborate regularly, and, whenever possible, we gather as a class outside to capture that energy.”

While he admits to not having a firm daily writing process, Gay did share the success he had when working on his 2019 anthology, The Book of Delights. “My natural inclination is to get consumed by my work. But for this project, I decided I would write for 30 minutes a day for one year. It was the first time I had a real routine,” he said. The result was “a spirited collection of short lyric essays … reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.” (Algonquin Books, February 2019)

Before closing, Gay treated students to a reading of one of his earlier poems, “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian.” It was a wonderful way to wrap up our speaker series for the year. ■

The challenge with teaching during a pandemic has been figuring out how to maintain the kind of energy that comes from being together in a classroom.

KENYON BISSELL GROGAN '76

THE BISSELL GROGAN HUMANITIES SYMPOSIUM WAS ESTABLISHED IN 2006 IN HONOR OF KENYON BISSELL GROGAN, FORMER CHAIR OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES AND BRIMMER GRADUATE OF THE CLASS OF 1976. THE GOAL OF THE SYMPOSIUM IS TO BOTH EDUCATE AND ENGAGE STUDENTS IN RELEVANT TOPICS OF TODAY. AN ANNUAL EVENT ATTENDED BY STUDENTS IN GRADES 7-12, IT INCLUDES KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND WORKSHOPS THAT EXPLORE A DIVERSE RANGE OF SUBJECTS ON A CHOSEN TOPIC. IN RECENT YEARS, WE HAVE FEATURED A VIRTUAL SPEAKER SERIES THAT ALLOWS US TO OPEN THE SYMPOSIUM UP TO A WIDER AUDIENCE.