Students Lead the Way with Successful Diversity Conference

Penn Charter’s inaugural Cheryl Irving Student Diversity Conference brought together 150 area students for an all-day event designed to give young leaders tools to be ambassadors for community building and social justice.

“It is our hope that after your conversations and experiences today, you all will go back to your schools empowered with resources and make great strides to promote the beauty of diversity,” PC senior and conference cofounder Pierce Hodges told students assembled in the Meeting Room on Saturday, March 2.

Reflecting on the conference afterward, Ainyae Holmes, senior and conference cofounder with Pierce Hodges, said the turnout and the content of the discussions gave her hope. “We aren’t alone in caring about these issues,” Ainyae said. “When so many people showed up, it made me realize that we have many allies who want to help.”

Director of Diversity and Inclusion Antonio Williams and student conference leaders Ainyae Holmes and Pierce Hodges succeeded in bringing together 150 students to discuss diversity, equity and inclusion.

The morning began with a keynote address from Rohan Arjun, director of admissions at George School, who told a poetic, tender story of leaving Jamaica—and his mother—to find a new life in the United States. He encouraged students: “Tell your stories loudly, boldly, unapologetically so that they become the master narratives around your identities.”

Supreme Dow, founder of the Black Writers Museum in Germantown, ended the afternoon with a second keynote, which Ainyae described as a call to action. “He told us it is up to our generation to make change,” she said. “We say we want it; we need to make a plan and go forward.”

During the middle of the day, students were actively involved in workshops, home groups, affinity groups and panel discussions. In addition to Pierce and Ainyae, PC students developed the content and led many of the workshops and affinity groups.

Workshop topics included Race & Identity, Colorism, False Representation in the Media, andCommunity Accountability. In the media workshop, PC seniors Bianca Bryant and Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi presented data and questioned why Hispanic movie characters are most often assigned roles as, in this order, criminals, gardeners and maids, but hardly ever as doctors. The series The Walking Dead has 266 characters, they said, and six are LGBTQ, or 2 percent; the show takes place in Atlanta where the LGBTQ population is 4.2 percent. “To not show the whole of humanity is to deny LGBTQ people,” said Bianca.

Students who selected this workshop shared their own analysis about current media: “Black Panther was not a black movie,” said one student. “Black people were portrayed positively, running their own country … but Wakanda was a bubble, not the black experience. It was a superhero movie, it doesn’t address our problems.”

In the Colorism workshop, Leila Sor and Lizzy Ominsky asked students to identify personalities they find attractive, and used the responses to launch a discussion about light vs. dark skin tone. Historically, they said, enslaved people with lighter skin were often kept as “house slaves,” while African Americans with

The all-day Saturday conference included affinity groups in which students could discuss issues of particular interest to their race. In this photo, students in the Asian/Asian Pacific Islander affinity group are loosening up with an icebreaker activity called the Foot Handshake Dance.

Their session ended with a video of an elementary school teacher’s well-known lesson about brown and white eggs: Break open each egg, and the inside is the same.

Students selected from panel discussions that included topics such as college life and law enforcement. For Pierce, a high point of the all-day event was the panel with a Philadelphia Police inspector and a Pennsylvania state trooper. The Gummere Library was packed with students who elected to attend that session, and when the two police officers finished their remarks and opened up to questions, Pierce said, “it seemed every hand in the room shot up. I thought, wow, this is really working.”

Students, most of them African American, had questions about police violence, about building better relations between police and community, and they had safety concerns such as: What do I do if I get pulled over?

Randomly assigned students formed “home groups” so they could discuss race, class and gender with people they might not know. “The home groups had about 19 or 20 in each, and they lasted two hours,” said Ainyae. “The idea was to gain new connections and new friends in an intimate space.”

Pierce said affinity groups, including African American, White Caucasian, Asian/Asian Pacific Islander, Hispanic and multiracial groups, provided another opportunity to talk comfortably about topics specific to that race.

To differentiate the PC conference and appeal to local students, Pierce and Ainyae modeled the conference on the training students undertake at the annual National Association of Independent Schools Student Diversity Leadership Conference, or NAIS SDLC. Both of them have attended the conference, but it

Leila Sor and Lizzy Ominsky presented a workshop on Colorism, a form of prejudice or discrimination in which people are treated differently based on social meanings attached to skin color.

is selective, with a maximum of six students from any school admitted in a given year. And conference and travel cost can be prohibitive.

Pierce and Ainyae initiated the PC conference idea almost a year ago and worked to develop the goals and programming for the day in collaboration with Director of Diversity and Inclusion Antonio Williams and Upper School teachers Shahidah Kalam Id-Din and Ruth McGee.

Students and teachers worked their networks to build attendance; PC students were joined by students from Abington Friends, Agnes Irwin, Baldwin, Episcopal, Friends Select, Germantown Academy, Germantown Friends, Haverford, Malvern, Shipley, and Springside Chestnut Hill.

“I am impressed with this student leadership and their willingness to focus on issues that matter to them and to society,” said Penn Charter Head of School Darryl J. Ford. “This is an important day of conversation and understanding, and that’s what schools are all about.” PC

The Cheryl Irving Student Diversity Conference was named for the lateCheryl O. Irving Hon. 1689, Penn Charter teacher and champion of diversity.

Read Darryl Ford’s eulogy of Irving, who died in May 2014, at penncharter.com/Irving.