 All of my viewers out there, thank you for joining me today. My name is Melinda Moulton, and I am your host of On the Waterfront with Melinda. And today I have two wonderful, wonderful people that are going to be on my show. I have Lindsay Hallman, who is the Executive Director of Up for Learning. And I have Harry Frank, who is the Program Director of Up for Learning as well. And the two of them are joining me today to talk about their work and their lives and how they got into this work. And it's going to be a wonderful 30 minutes. So thank you, you two, for joining me. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, so you all were on my show a few years ago and talking about your organization Up for Learning. And I wanted to have you come back because a lot has been happening in your organization, especially with COVID. And your organization is basically a leader in making sure that education for children is accessible and inclusive. So I wanted to have you come back and share your work. So I'm going to start first with Harry Frank, who is the Program Director Up for Learning. And Harry, you and I have known each other for many, many years. You're my neighbor. But I want you to share with us how you got into this work and what makes this work so fulfilling for you. Thanks, Melinda. It's nice to be here. And even though we're close in geography, like the Zoom platform is extraordinary for bringing us together. So thanks for that. I've been thinking about this question a lot. I think I've thought about it a lot for many years. When I was a student in high school, I remember very, like in my gut, I'm feeling like I didn't fit. Even though on the surface, I am the kind of reference point. You know, I'm a white male who has grown up with lots of opportunity and support. And it was such a disconnect for me to realize that, well, I just experienced in my gut all the time that I wasn't successful, that it wasn't a good fit for me, that not that I didn't enjoy the social world of school, but the academic world of school really was a diminishing experience for me. And so I left that experience really clear that that wasn't a good thing. And it wasn't until after I left high school, and I took time off between going to finishing high school and going to college, that I met a few adults kind of randomly in some ways and kind of set up who actually started to really engage me in who I was and what I was interested in and make me feel like I had capability. And I just felt, I still feel so indebted to those people and their teachers and coaches and neighbors, really. So I went into education because I thought, I can't, I got to do everything I can to not let what happened to me happen to other people. And so that's the core story for me. And what's been really provocative in these last few years is this recognition that are recognizing that I sit, I have always sat and still sit in a position of real privilege. And yet our system didn't work for me. And then I extrapolate from now, I just try to put myself in other people's shoes. And I think, man, there are even other layers that people have to navigate. So I think that I know that's why I do the work. I want to sort of connect it to up for learning, but maybe I'll just pause there because that was sort of the question is like, where did it come from? Where and I pass it to Lindsay because, and in some respects, it was kind of fun because as much as I've worked with Lindsay closely, I don't know that we've ever totally had this kind of conversation about like why. So I'm just really curious to hear your answer to. Well, I think the why is really important as we as I as I talk to people about this the work that they do, serving our community and our planet and our people. And so so Lindsay Hallman, who is the executive director of up for learning. Lindsay, could you please share with us what what drew you to this work? What inspired you to become the person that you are on the work that you do today for up for learning? Yeah, thank you. And I will just echo that piece around the why and when in our work that is like the core of our work with our youth and adult teams and schools is helping them discover their why because if you don't know your why, then what you're doing really isn't grounded in purpose. So so my why why why I do this work is similarly to Harry in the sense that my educational experience was fine. It it, you know, I could play the game of school as a young person. And but I saw it fail too many people around me, family members and friends. And it certainly was not all of my like, really engaging and powering experiences as a young person came from outside of school, whether it was work that I did as an activist, a young activist or work that I did, you know, outside of school, internships. So when I actually decided to pursue education, it was because I felt like that there is something fundamentally wrong with our system that needs to be that needs to be fixed so that all young people have have an education that is empowering, engaging and meaningful and that it sets them up for a path of success. So I was a middle school educator for 15 years. And I love middle school because it's such an important time in a young person's life. There's so many things happening developmentally where they're changing, they're trying to discover who they are. They want autonomy, but they also want to be supported. And it's just this big kind of point of tension all the time, just like this tug of war, basically always. And I loved my experience as a middle level educator. And I was given the opportunity for about a decade of my time in the public school system to create a school within a school. So I, we had a superintendent at the time that really was a disruptor and an innovator and asked for disruptors and innovators to step up and make change within the public school system. So in 2009, that was, that was like just, that was my why. That's what I had been doing in my own little bubble in my classroom and the work that I had done with young people for years. And so that's where the Edge Academy in Essex, that's where it developed. And for about a decade, I spent my time trying to disrupt and change the system from within. And it was really, really hard. The work that I did with young people and our adult partners every day was tremendous and hard and challenging and joyful, all those things. But really, the system just wanted us to create status quo, to keep replicating the status quo. So when I had the opportunity to join up for learning in 2018, I was really ready to create larger system change because it can't just happen in pockets. We cannot just be disrupting and innovating in small pockets. Educational equity is a basic human right. And that is fundamentally what we believe it up for learning. And that's the work that we're trying to do every day. So that's my why. It's like, I also, I'm a white, you know, person, I experienced many privileges in my life, but I know that, you know, the game of school does not work for a lot of young people. And so that's our work is to bring young people and adults together to talk about what, what do they desire for their educational journey? Thank you so much for that, Lindsay. Thank you. So I'm gonna bring, I'm gonna bring us all back together so that we can, so that we can talk together here in our gallery mode. Hi. So thank you for that for those personal testimonies on why you're doing the work you are doing for up for learning. Let's talk a little bit about this organization, how it got started, what is it, who does it serve? And I'm gonna let the two of you figure out who wants to talk about what. And, and let's share with our viewers, what is up for learning? Because I, looking at your annual report, I just, I just want to tell you, I was blown away. By the way, there is a website, there is a website that everybody who was, who right now is on this call on watching the show, they need to go to your website, which is what is your website up for learning.com? Up for learning.org. Up for learning.org. Up for learning.org. Go right now to their website and check out, first of all, an incredible website, but you, but you all are serving literally 96% of all Vermont high schools are involved in your program. You have 38 youth adult teams, which is 426 teams, teams since 2008. You're involved in 56% of all Vermont middle schools and 11% of Vermont elementary schools. You have 332 youth leaders, 332 youth leaders. This is extraordinary. I mean, your reach is wide and far. And I'm assuming since you go back to 2008, that must be the inception of this organization. So I want to hear about this. I want to hear about, why did you do it? How did you extraordinarily grow to this, to this level where your reach is so wide and, and talk amongst yourselves about this and share this with our viewers? Again, Harry Frank is the program director out for learning and Lindsay and Lindsay Hallman is the executive director up for learning. So the two of you are here today. And so share this with our viewers about this organization. Lindsay, can I jump in and do sort of the history, the origins? And then I think you can add and take it. So the organization was founded by Helen Beatty, who had worked in public health administration in the first half of her career and then made a shift to school health through work as a school psychologist. And she always told the story of students who were sent to her because they'd been identified as the problem. And, and her recognition that actually there was something happening systemically, like in our institutions and that pointing the finger at the individual child was not going to help us move the experience for young people and adults. And so her, I think genius was to say, okay, the way we're going to move this is to come together as young people and adults and actually be at the table together. And there's a lot to that. How do we work as true partners? How do we engage in thoughtful conversation? I think one of the other sort of critical building blocks that Helen established was the use of data in this conversation that it's not just about you and I sitting across the table from each other. Well, it is. I mean, we need to engage with each other. We need to know each other, just like you gave us the opportunity to talk about who we are and why we do the work. And Lindsay said it too. I mean, that's where it starts. I think when we start to move outward and say, you know what, we're going to, we're going to work on behalf of our community, then we're really obligated to say, well, what do other people think and feel and experience? And we need to listen. We need to collect as much data, whether that's, you know, percentages on a survey or interviews or small group conversations. Or maybe we do really dynamic things like have the youngest students who work with us, you know, create art pieces, like draw pictures, you know, find ways to share what they're experiencing, what they hope for, what they are challenged by. So what evolved over the first decade was really this practice of participatory action research, which is this framework for saying, we're going to come together, build a true partnership and look at information, look at data together, and continually sort of check our assumptions with our community. So there's a lot of back and forth around asking questions and engaging in dialogue before identifying, if this is what we think is important, let's pay attention here and let's make a difference here. So that's how I understand our evolution. And I feel like Lindsey has stepped in in the last, it's been three years now as director and taken that model and I'll let you describe, but I can just say as somebody that was involved from the beginning, I feel like the model has now sort of matured and advanced and been able to embrace a much wider range or much wider sort of set of needs that's out there. So I'll toss it over to you. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah. And 2018 is when I joined up. So I joined up as a program director first and brought with me my passion and interest and expertise in restorative practices and my experience as a educator working with middle level learners, because primarily up for learning was working with high schools. That's why you can see like our percentage of high schools that we've worked with in the state of Vermont is really, really high. And most of our programs are really focused on that particular audience. We were working with some middle schools, but I brought in kind of that middle school like this work can happen with all age groups. And now we're working with elementary schools as well. The way that we go about it, the process is the same, but like developmentally, we might have to change things to make sure that we're really meeting the needs of those younger learners. So when I joined up for learning, I brought with me a lot of my lived experience and work as a practitioner in restorative justice and restorative practices. That at the same time has, you know, become an area of real deep interest and a need for our school systems of how we ensure that every person in a school community feels connected and a sense of belonging, so that people want to be in relationship with each other, want to be engaged in their learning. And so I guess to pick up where Harry left off, our work has kind of evolved, especially due to the pandemic, I would say as well, because we saw as soon as we went to fully virtual facilitation in 2020, this work doesn't, it doesn't matter if it's in person or online, it's one in the same. We can do this work no matter where we are. And this work is more important now than ever. So we're now working with districts and full schools rather than small teams in a school. Like so our work is really expanding in more of a systems approach. So we're working in Burlington, Manuski, we're working in the Susquey Valley School District, Greater Rutland County Supervisory Union to look at how do we do this work around youth little partnership as a system? How do we center youth and this work around whatever might be whether it's restorative practices, social emotional learning, transforming schools together as partners so that it's not just this niche thing that's happening over here because they're champions, but it becomes really the fabric of the institution. It's really about transform transformation. Basically it's baked in. It's baked in, exactly. So I just want to get specific here because of our time. Lindsay, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I would love it if you would talk to us about what is that work? Because it's the work and the restorative, but for our viewers to bring it down to a level that we all can understand is give us an example of what that work is of how their children are seeing this work in their schools. Can you do that? Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, Harry, it looks like you want to jump in. Yeah, because I made a list of all these stories I wanted to tell, and we'll see how many we get to. So the one that comes to mind where we are in the conversation, so last year what's called the Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together team at Setford Academy was grappling with what do we do to contribute to the experience of young people in this community. They'd been on this path to really refine the personalized learning plans. That's what the YATS team had been focused on for the previous couple of years, and then they realized, gosh, the world has changed. We need to listen to what's happening out there. So they developed a new survey that really asked about how people were doing. We used, I shared the survey that our Youth Advisory Council had developed, which was very similar in character and detail. It was looking at how are your relationships, how is your health, what about your hopes and dreams, what about your frustrations, and so they polled their students and staff, and they got all this really helpful information identifying like what could we do to help people feel connected in this, you know, they were somewhat virtual in person. I mean, it was an evolving environment last year, and they, as a team, really helped the leadership of the school identify the advisory program where students and teachers get to meet together. Individual and small groups needed much more support and time and resources. And so they shifted their program last year to be really responsive to that. And that's now, they're building on that this year. So that's one story that I think was just so thoughtful that the students really said, we need to listen to each other right now. Right, right. That's fabulous. So Lindsay, how do people engage with your organization? How do my viewers engage? Do they, or how do you move through the school systems so that parents and children are engaged? How do they, why would somebody contact you? Who would contact you to get involved in the programs that you're in? Would it just, is it the school, how does it work? How does your organization work and how do people get engaged? Yeah, so certainly, there's a lot of ways to get engaged with our organization. But mostly it's, you know, people from within the school or a district will reach out saying, I want to do this work. And I believe that youth need to be centered in this work. So like, there has to be a fundamental desire, maybe not a belief yet, right? Because we're changing mindsets, it's a paradigm shift. There has to be this desire and a want to have youth centered in this work. Because school is done to and for young people too often. And really for school to be, they're the primary consumers of school or our youth, it should be done with them. And so they need to be at the table every step of the way. So really, we get to reach out and we have five different programs that are year long programs that are wrapped around specific kind of goal, perhaps, whether it's restorative practices, cultivating pathways to sustainability, which looks really deeply at the United Nations Sustainable Development goals, and creating projects around those goals, are getting to why program is one of our oldest programs. It's also also been nationally designated as a best practice through the association for maternal and child health programs. It's young people and their adult partners looking at the youth risk behavior survey data, which is every middle school and high school student in Vermont takes that survey. And in fact, it's a national survey. And they're looking at their own data, looking for strengths and concerns, bringing together their whole school community around that, and then creating an action plan for change around wellness, health, safety, etc. So it's sometimes it's principal, sometimes it's educator, sometimes it's parents advocating for this, community partners. We do a lot of work with other nonprofits. So we have a partnership program with Shelburne Farms. Last year we worked in Winooski with Spectrum. So the collective impact of organizations coming together to bring their different talents and expertise to serve a community is something that we're really, really passionate about. And so we're always trying to say who else in this community is supporting the school. So we're not doing this work again in silos. So it really is a reach out of people who are interested in centering young people in the change process. So Harry, for my viewers, for my viewers, how, how, how do they get involved? How do they engage with up for learning? Most of my viewers are citizens in Chittenden County. What, how do they engage with the organization? So Lindsay, I was about to describe the work up in Swanton with Mississippi Valley, and I'm thinking there might be a connection with Melinda's question in the sense of how people in the community get involved, because that project has become such a community building project. So it's maybe not precisely Chittenden County context, but I think there's a real parallel. So, and Linda, you I think need to fill in some of the details, but I'll start by saying the Mississippi Valley School District, the superintendent and the curriculum director approached us. They, like all school districts, were charged by the agency of education to develop what's called the portrait of a graduate. So it's literally like a picture of what we want for our young people to know and be able to do and experience and feel when they leave our school systems. So it's this beautiful sort of opportunity to talk about what is it that we want for young people and what do we need to do as a community to help to paint that picture with them. And they were really clear from day one, they wanted to work with us because we would bring young people to the table and they wanted to work with us because they wanted it to build community. They didn't want to just come up with this beautiful document. They wanted it to all be about the relationship building that could come from it. And so the team, which is a big team, I think 25, 29 people included students from all the middle and high schools, teachers and elementary administrators, teachers, staff, and community members. So there were school board members, the director of the recreation program, members of the Abnaki community. It was this amazing outreach. And so the last thing I want to say, and then Lindsay, I'll toss it to you. So the dynamic that was so touching and honestly funny and playful was the student was that we collaborated with students to design and facilitate these work sessions. And every time we entered into the work with kind of a playful, slightly unusual question or task by draw a picture of your ideal pet or tell us what, you know, you'd like your name to be if it could be an animal. And we had these exchanges between elementary, middle, high school students and their teachers, their administrators. Did no one had ever experienced before. They were just so thoughtful and insightful and honest and caring. And people often would comment and say, I've never had that. I've never talked with my students that way or I've never had that kind of conversation with a community partner. And we're working with them again this year. So we're carrying forward. We're still in process. But to me, that's been one of the most beautiful experiences recently. But that's only part of the picture. Lindsay, maybe I'll throw it to you. I just want to say also that so we ask everything that we do internally reflects what we do externally. So we have a really robust youth advisory council and we have, I would say at this point, maybe 30 to 40 youth co facilitators in all of our programming because we have programming that's both within Vermont, but also we're working in other states as well. And so we co create co design and plan and facilitate with our youth partners. That's also really different for for schools too. And so we model everything that we do internally should be seen on, you know, what we do on the outside is what we do on the inside. They are one in the same. And there's a quote that we've been talking a lot about actually it's in that report. We've been as a staff together, we've been reading the book emergent strategy by Adrian Murray Brown, which is just really, it's probably like the fifth time I've read it, but together as a team, it just resonates so deeply about our work. And there's a quote from it's Grace Lee Boggs and Adrian Murray Brown having Grace Lee Boggs pose the question, what time is it on the world clock? And Adrian Murray Brown says it's time for our values, time to close the gap between our values and our practice. And that's the work that we are trying to do every day both internally as an organization and externally with our team. So we really grounded in what are the values that we all share. We all have common values. Now how do we close that gap? And so we can see that in practice. So it's not just talk, talky talk, things that we say we do when it's on the websites or this or that, it's actually we can see it happening and young people can feel it happening. So young our youth leaders are an essential component of our organization. We have two youth members on our board of directors that are full voting members. And they really are guiding and leading us every step of the way. But just really quickly to get back to your question of how do people in Chinden County get involved? There's so many different ways. So we are always looking for more youth who and when we're talking about youth leaders, we are really, really clear with schools and communities that we are looking for a representative group of youth leaders. We want the youth that voice the voices that have not been at the table, because those are the most important voices. There are equally as important as the voices that have been at the table historically. So so somebody from a youth leader, I mean, how if one of my viewers out there feels that they would make a great youth leader, how does that happen? You can just reach out to reach out to us, Lindsay, L-I-N-D-S-E-Y at upforlearning.org, or you can go to our website. There's a contact us and you can just send us a little message. And we want to grow these opportunities for young people across the state and across the country and, you know, and world ultimately. And so we one thing that I also want to say is that our youth leaders are compensated for all of their work that they do with us as an organization. So all the time that they spend planning, co-designing, co-creating and facilitating, they are compensated for that. And that's something that is another one of our values that we put in practice. I mean, another thing is, is that we are a non-profit. And so schools, we certainly get some of our funding from schools program fees, but schools are strapped for funding. And so we're always looking for support from the community and supporting our supporting our organization and growing our program. So that's another way. If people are interested in our organization, they can certainly find out more about that. Is there a donate button on your website? There's a donate button on our website. So if all my viewers upforlearning.org go to the website, no contribution is too small and support this work. Thank you, Lindsay. Thank you. Yeah. And we have, you know, so, you know, we, we try to ensure that funding is never a barrier for any school or community that wants to do this work. So we're constantly looking for ways to support schools and making this work happen because it can't be about money to make this work happen. It just has to be a given. Well, listen, we, we've come to the end of our half hour here. And I, I mean, I think this happened last time that I, that I met with you and spoke with you. I think we could probably speak for hours about the work that you do. This is so deep and so profound. And so to my viewers, again, I want to direct you to the upforlearning website, upforlearning.org and go visit the website and learn more about this organization to Lindsay Hauman and Harry Frank. I want to thank you for being on my show. And I'll see you on the other side when I stop the recording, but I want to thank you so much for once again being on my show. And I have a thought, I have a thought that I'm thinking maybe we should do. So wouldn't it be great to bring some of your youth leaders into a Zoom and do, and do a show talking to them and asking them questions about the world and how they see the world and actually doing a half an hour show, my show, with a few of your, of your youth leaders. And so I want to talk to you. I would love to do that. Absolutely. Yeah. And we have a youth advisory council retreat coming up in a week and a half. And it would be exciting to put that opportunity on the agenda and have them take it and go with it. Thanks for that. And we could do a show just like this with a few of the youth leaders, and I could propose questions to them about the world that they see and what their hopes and dreams are and what they need more from us as adults, that we need to step up and what can we do for them? And I would love to have that discussion go out to our community so they can really hear from these young people who are really the hope of our future. So to both of you, I honor the work that you do. It's amazing. And so upforlearning.org and to my viewers, thank you for sitting in for another one of my Zooms. And I will see you shortly. Take care and be well.