OurYear

A Year in Review: Sparking Impact

We did something remarkable together. It’s time to step back, take in the story, and allow this story to spark innovation for our future work with students.

Over the past nine years, this organization has grown from 2 teachers collaborating in a coffee shop in 2014 to a teacher training nonprofit that worked with over 100 teachers across 26 schools this year. As we wind down our operations as an organization, we decided to come together as a community one last time to create an impact report you can use. It has been the honor of a lifetime to walk alongside all 247 teachers, 43 administrators, 16 team members, and 12 community partners over these years, and the pages you are about to read showcase the unbelievable work of everyone who has helped to write this incredible story.

Our story is about voice.

It puts students, teachers, and communities right in the middle of the most complex questions in education and shines a light on the power of partnership in the classroom to answer these questions. What can you learn from these voices?

Our story is about empowerment.

As partnerships grew between students and teachers, their classrooms became spaces of shared power that put students on different trajectories of leadership and teachers on new paths of growth. How can you empower others around you in similar ways?

Our story is about ownership

And this is where you come in. We built something that empowers others in such a way that this work can and will naturally grow, evolve, and take root in new places. Where will our work take root in your world?

As you interact with this impact report, I urge you to deeply engage with this work rather than just read about it. As you learn about concrete restorative practices our teachers implemented, consider how you might make it your own. As you read about our early childhood restorative practices pilot, consider who you might know in your network who could benefit from this work. As you see how many people galvanized around the work this year, let it inspire you to build something like this in your own school.

This report is not just a report. It is an invitation to interact. It’s a call to action. It’s one last tool we can share as an RPIA team to all of you who believe, just like we do, that every student deserves the opportunity to lead.

To each of you who walked alongside me these past nine years: I hope you see your fingerprints on these pages in the ways that I do. To each of you reading this from wherever you may sit in this work, be encouraged. This work is not ending: it is just beginning.