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Dear Exchange Community,

This week’s Monday Message comes to you from the Reimagining Our Work (ROW) Convener’s Group:

¡El momento ha llegado! The time to reimagine early education is now!

We have a hard and uncertain road ahead.  

Who do you want to travel with on your ECE journey?

The Reimagining Our Work (ROW) Initiative is an opportunity to come together with comrades and allies to say: “We do not want to return to the normal that we have lived for countless years. Normal is what got us here. We want to move forward into something new!” To call that “something new” into being, the ROW Initiative brings small cohorts of people together with a facilitator to “study for action”. 

Equity and social justice are at the center of the guiding principles for the ROW Initiative—and at the center of the “something new” that we need to create in our field. We want all voices at the table for this work—all voices equally heard and valued, as we make a commitment to learn from and with each other, to think, to laugh, cry, dream and act together. We recognize that to create change, we must disrupt long-standing power structures in our field—power that determines who has access to leadership and significant decision-making.

In this journey of reimagining we need the courage of all voices, both the Person of Color and the white ally. If you are Black, if you are a Person of Color, if you are Indigenous, a ROW study-for-action cohort is a place for your authentic self, to speak your truth, to bring your ideas, to have your identity nourished, to shape a future of racial, ethnic and cultural equity outside of a system of racism and white supremacy.

If you are white, this is your opportunity to open the doors of access and encouragement and say, “We can’t move forward until the balance of power has shifted in our thinking and our actions. What might true inclusiveness and equity look like if white people weren’t at the center?” Imagine how banishing the idea of “other” could free your soul!

Reimagining requires a reckoning with ourselves and our communities, a reckoning that ultimately leads to repair. It is about being able to find yourself in a community where you can bring your authentic self. It is about being someplace where you are investing your time, not wasting it.  

Come…and let’s transform this field and our lives!

In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

Go to exchangepress.com/row to learn more and sign up.

Eagerly waiting to have you join us,

Pam Boulton, Margie Carter, Raynice Jean-Sigur, Chris Whitmire, Luz Casio, Ann Pelo, Cecilia Scott-Croff, Kristie Stamps-Norwood
— Conveners of the ROW Initiative

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