WAESN 3rd Annual Assembly on Organizing for Ethnic Studies Archives

by Ari Robin McKenna

The “Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN) 3rd Annual Assembly on Organizing for Ethnic Studies” will be held virtually on Saturday, April 24, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It features keynote speaker Dr. Verónica (Vero) Vélez, an organizer, activist, and award-winning professor at University of Western Washington, as well as keynote panelists Brent Jones Jr., the incoming interim Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools (SPS), Brandon Hersey, the SPS South End board director of District 7, and more than 20 other speakers.

In recent conversation with the Emerald, Tracy Castro-Gill, the executive director of WAESN, says the goal of the assembly is “to build collective capacity, and let people know where they can plug into existing efforts, or how they can start their own efforts.” She stressed how this assembly differs from standard professional development workshops for teachers, saying, “There’s people who are individually trying to do this in their classroom, but we know that to teach ethnic studies well, you need a community behind you. It’s not a traditional education conference, it’s about organizing and networking and building community. It’s a lot of how to do those things on different levels.”

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