SPRING 2021 AFTERSCHOOL CLASSES
APRIL 2021 - JUNE 2021
regen teens
Mondays & Wednesdays, 3pm - 6pm | April - June 2021 | Ages 13+
A youth employment program focused on community food sovereignty, environmental justice, and cooperative business development—with Briggin Scharf and Suanny Upegui.
Our Spring ReGen program brought teens together as entrepreneurial earth stewards - ready to tend our garden, nourish their relationships with each other, and develop their own regenerative business ideas! This semester the ReGen Teens began launching their cooperative of youth-run businesses: selling bicycle-powered smoothies at local pop-ups, offering dog-walking services, producing and distributing value-added products, silkscreening shirts and selling upcycled clothing, and running our city-wide compost program. They worked closely with Sweet Freedom Farm, helping to build a hoop-house while learning about the connections between food sovereignty, environmental justice, and abolition. The teens closed out the semester with a public event -- a youth-powered plant sale and regenerative business pop-up - called ReGen Fest.
ROOTS & REBELS GARDEN CLUB
Tuesdays, 3pm - 6:00pm | April - June 2021 | Ages 8-14
Get your hands dirty at the River City Garden. With Sharece Johnson and Heylan Tsumagari.
Our Roots & Rebels Garden Club met weekly at the River City Garden. We tended our garden, learning to seed, plant, water, weed, and harvest. We learned about insects by catching and examining them, and as usual, dug up lots of worms. We nature-based craft projects, building our own bird feeders and creating bottle terrariums with seedlings. We played our favorite outdoor games, practicing our jump rope and kickball skills, and laughing as we played X and Y. One of the most important aspects of garden club is creating a culture of friendship and togetherness, and we have found that this is usually achieved through food: so we harvested, chopped, grilled, and snacked together!
Media club
Wednesdays, 3pm - 6pm | April - June 2021 | Ages 13+
Supporting youth as creative media-makers and storytellers. With Sharece Johnson.
Our Media Club supports youth to produce innovative stories about how they see and experience the world; and to critically analyze, interpret, and reflect on culture and media representation. In Spring 2021, our media club had two main parts: a teen-led film screening and discussion club, where we watched and discussed films including Moonlight, Do the Right Thing, and others. And an ongoing VLOG project, where we created BuzzFeed-style vlogs about key themes. Teens produced films about hair (stigma, styles, and stories), family recipes, and more.
SOUL & SOIL
Thursdays, 3pm - 6pm | April - June 2021 | Ages 13+
Healing circle practice for rooting in our radicle selves. With Xóchicoatl Bello and Heylan Tsumagari.
Soul & Soil is a weekly healing circle for youth fellows to deepen with who they are, who they come from, and all we are seeding for our future. Youth met weekly this spring to connect with the sacredness of their identities, their people, their emotions, and one another - and to explore who we are together when we move with a little more awareness of each others’ stories. Together we practiced skills to walk with more healing in our lives, connecting to our communities, families, and lineages to access the traditions and histories of healing that already exist within us. Sometimes that meant writing and sharing poems about where we come from; keeping journals to explore the identities placed on us or weaponized against us, identities we want to compost, and the identities we choose to claim and reclaim; creating food from our family traditions to share with each other (like the gimbap & miso soup shared by Heylan!); being in powerful circle together and reveling in each other’s cuteness in our process of becoming. Soul & Soil is an accompaniment to our youth employment programs, and an exploration of how Kite’s Nest can employ youth within a liberatory rather than capitalist framework, centering their whole selves.
SOCIAL JUSTICE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY
Fridays, 3pm - 6pm | April - June 2021 | Ages 13+
Transformative youth organizing, arts, and healing to build a more just world. With Sharece Johnson and Jalal Sabur.
Our afterschool Social Justice Leadership Academy (SJLA) was a weekly space for teens to gather, connect, grieve, heal, learn, play and organize. SJLA afterschool brought together Senior Fellows and Rising Junior Fellows, as older teens supported their younger peers to step up as youth staff during our summer intensive. This Spring we rooted ourselves in reflections on the past year, making space for building and deepening our connections. We reviewed our organizing strategies, building up our core skills for building campaigns, direct actions, and creative resistance. We developed our own personal and collective theories of change, guided by the question: what is my role in the movement? And we dove into preparations for the summer, preparing for teen-run workshops, trainings, and games as they step into more leadership in every aspect of the program. The teens developed some core curriculum to lead on their own, including: Intro to Systemic Racism, Microaggressions, and all kinds of creative skillshares.
HIKING CLUB
Weekends | February - June 2021 | Ages 13+
Weekly outdoor hikes & adventures with teens. With Heylan Tsumagari and Xóchicoatl Bello.
Our Hiking Club was a weekly place for teens to connect with the lands around us. Starting in the chilly winter months, each week we went out on wellness walks - tending our hearts and bodies, soaking in sunshine, stomping in puddles, making offerings and seeding dreams, feeling the seasons change, and celebrating our adventurous selves. From Olana to the Kaaterskill Creek, from Falling Waters Preserve to Stissing Mountain and Beebe Hill State Forest, our Hiking Club Sundays were a joyful reminder that we are nature!