How do Futures Without Violence and WestEd aim to transform the way students understand violence, courage, and resilience?
Lauren Trout, Senior Program Associate, WestEd:
Futures Without Violence is a nonprofit organization who’s been around for, I think about 40 years. And they particularly work in the area of gender-based violence. Somewhere, I think within the last five, six years, they had this idea to build a museum in part of their San Francisco office, which is located in the Presidio. And the idea is that this museum will serve as a space for people to explore the role of courage inside of ending different types of discrimination and hate, and particularly in spheres of gender and racial violence. And they have hired WestEd to design the educational programming elements of this museum.
They are really working to integrate science and empathy and different storytelling around activism inside of installations so that visitors, particularly high school aged young people and their educators, will have experiences of seeing courage, of exploring what it looks like to be embodied, like have courage embodied, and to explore this idea of like what does it mean to imagine a world without violence. What is my role in that, in the very small spheres of my community, my classrooms, my school, all the way, all the way to as big as it gets globally. And what is the role that, that courage plays inside of reducing and eliminating violence?