The Seeding Disruption Fellowship helps youth-facing professionals in DC solve problems with equity-driven design thinking.
Seeding Disruption is a Washington, DC-based fellowship to build knowledge, skills, and community across racial difference and youth-facing professional fields — and to catalyze movement toward racial equity.
Educational entities are at best unaware of, and at worst actively advancing, racial inequities. The Seeding Disruption Fellowship seeks to intentionally disrupt patterns of inequity in ways that will contribute to the dismantling of existing systems and rebuilding of more equitable ones.
The Seeding Disruption Fellowship brings together a diverse group of leaders in Washington, DC, from organizations doing work in PK–12 education and in intersecting fields. Over the course of 13 months, participants develop their skills and knowledge as leaders for equity; build community across racial difference, organizations, and fields; and generate, seed, and catalyze disruptive practices for the purpose of dismantling systems of racial inequity in Washington, DC. The group centers its work on students, though participants come to that shared focus from a range of perspectives. Our pilot cohort of 24 participants began its work in 2017.
Seeding Disruption is a co-creation of Michelle Molitor and Abigail Smith. Michelle and Abigail have a combined 40+ years in public education, most of that in Washington, DC. They bring extensive perspective and experience that spans teaching, school leadership, non-profit management, and high-level school district and local government leadership in DC. Seeding Disruption’s inaugural cohort was generously funded by Education Forward DC.
Why Seeding Disruption?
Our PK-12 educational organizations overwhelmingly reflect and reinforce the patterns of racial inequity upon which the broader systems of our country are built. From curriculum and instructional approach, to school culture and staffing, to school accountability and student assignment policy, our educational entities are at best blind to, and at worst actively advancing racial inequities.
Analogous challenges exist across every arena that intersects with public education – from criminal justice and housing, to transportation and health. Moreover, the interactions of these other areas with public education often serve to mutually reinforce the inequities that fester within each individual arena. A history of racist housing policy, for example, reinforces school segregation, and vice versa. And while questions of equity extend well beyond race, race has played – and continues to play – an outsized role in almost every sphere of life for residents of the District of Columbia.
As professionals whose work directly impacts the lives of children and youth, we seek to intentionally disrupt these patterns in ways that will contribute to the dismantling of existing systems and rebuilding of more equitable ones.
Interested in joining the Seeding Disruption Fellowship?
Applications are currently closed, but let us know if you’d like to join our mailing list to be notified when our next cohort opens up!