Morning Session

Join us for a conversation about moving beyond performative allyship. In this workshop, you will reflect on your own identity and how that has shaped your perspective, learn more about queer theory/history, and brainstorm ways that we can continue to create a queer-inclusive school community. Facilitated by Georgia Cox, Amanda Koeppel and Fin Carroll with special guest Maggie Pilloton a consultant from The Spahr Center.

From medical innovation to legislation, democracy is an essential idea in the medical field. Join Bobby Mukkamala, AMA board chair, to discuss how doctors in the AMA go from idea to policy. This session will develop the theoretical democracy of medicine along with health care policy for the country (what's going well and where we can improve).

Explore the history, culture, past, present and future of Our San Francisco Bay with students from Environmental Science class. Expect presentations, a science activity & discussions.

In this interactive workshop, award-winning NPR investigative journalist, Molly Peterson, will share her work with The California Reporting Project on Police Misconduct in the state using innovative tools of data science and machine learning among other resources. We will discuss specific cases and look at why it’s worth investigating police misconduct and build a big database to do it, how we look at bias through language in police reports, and work to make data out of subjective reports. We will explore how police respond to transparency efforts and how machine learning might help us do an even better job of addressing incidents of police misconduct.

This panel discussion focuses on the different perspectives and responses among independent schools in moving forward from the prevalence of AAPI hate during the pandemic. Students from Bay Area and Independent schools in other states will come together to share their experiences to think beyond it to consider what our institutions could and should be doing to better address Asian racism.

In this session, we will hear from political consultant Michael Terris and elections lawyer Jim Sutton about innovations in the elections, polling, and campaigning processes. Following the 2020 elections and subsequent push back about the security and evolution of such a vital democratic practice, participants will be offered a unique opportunity to hear from lawyers themselves about pending and past changes. From absentee ballots, to polling practices, to creating districts, Terris and Sutton will engage and debate their different viewpoints and provide unusual insights. The session will conclude with the opportunity for a live Q&A with questions generated by participants.

Protect Democracy is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization formed in late 2016 with an urgent and explicit mission: to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. The representative speaking is Ian Bassin, he is a co-founder and executive director for Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel, where in addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government. He will be speaking on the future of democracy and preventing the decline of democracy in our country.

James Kass is the founder of Youth Speaks which is an organization based in San Francisco focused on young people using art to create social change. He will explore how young people today utilize multiple methods of communication with increasing urgency to call for the expansion of what it means to be enfranchised participants in the building of a thriving democratic society. Your particular hunger for truth and authentic engagement - combined with a wish to be informed, to tell stories, to critically and creatively analyze your worlds, and to present that information in a way that is accessible to large and diverse audiences - is critical to build the necessary narrative shifts that will drive a more just society. James Kass will give a presentation, lead an interactive writing workshop, and do Q&A about the principles of learning to trust your voice, which he calls First Sound.

In this interactive workshop, educators and filmmakers Eli and Kahlil Jacobs-Fantauzzi will be sharing their work and leading a conversation about what participatory filmmaking and non-extractive story telling look like. Our film “We Still Here” shows how the youth of Comerío, Puerto Rico become leaders in their community after hurricane Maria. Through a process of participatory design and ground up solutions, these young people help their community create a better future for themselves. Join us and let us explore how youth can lead us to a stronger and more participatory democracy.

Ella Gantman is the co-founder of the Poll Hero Project, an organization with the mission to recruit young people to be poll workers during the 2020 election. Gantman was directly involved in training volunteers to conduct poll worker recruitment and helped facilitate the connection process between students and election boards. She provided press coverage for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, NPR, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, AP, The Today Show, CBS, Wired, TIME, SIRIUSXM, and was awarded the Princeton School of Public and International Affair's Class of 2022 James D. Zirin '61 and Marlene Hess Scholar in the Nation's Service.

Every one of us and every community in which we live, study and work has a unique set of assets. Identifying what these strengths are in ourselves and in the MA and greater community is key to making a sustainable, meaningful, positive impact. Join Darcy Ellsworth Yow (the MAPA Community Engagement Committee, Director of Community Engagement at MCDS and active supporter of local non-profits) in this interactive workshop as we play with some tools in the spirit of the 'ABCDs' of Asset-Based Community Development and leave feeling inspired and empowered to go out and innovate democracy!

Ever wonder how 435 congressmen, few of them experts in international affairs, decide how to vote on North Korean nuclear weapons sanctions? Or illegal fishing? Or malaria? In this session, Ty Loft (MA ’14) will give you a behind the scenes look at D.C.’s think tanks: a key source of the new ideas that innovate U.S. foreign policy. Ty worked at the world’s top international relations think tank, CSIS, after college and is currently an Allbritton Scholar at Oxford. We’ll explore how think tanks link the country’s foremost academics to elite decision makers. Then we’ll talk through a case study exploring how think tanks have led policy to combat sea slavery and illegal fishing in the geopolitically fraught Southwest Atlantic.

Entrepreneur and CEO Sarah Collins is best known as creator of the Wonderbag, a simple but revolutionary non-electric slow cooker that saves up to 70% of cooking time and thus cooking fuel, money, and labor. Sarah pioneered quantifying the fuel savings from Wonderbag cooking as a verified carbon offset, one of the first household carbon projects in the world. She re-invests carbon offset financing back into communities through Wonderbag cooking, transforming women’s lives and building resilient communities. An activist during the Apartheid Era of South Africa, Sarah has spent her life’s work dedicated to improving the lives of women using business and innovation to drive political and social change.