Cultures of Belonging Consultants 2023 - 2024

Consultants

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Ethan Apter

Eytan Apter

Dr. Eytan Apter has been teaching social studies in middle and high school for twenty years and is currently teaching at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Washington, DC. He received his PhD from Fordham University focusing on teaching controversial issues in the classroom. He has worked with Facing History and Ourselves designing curricula and facilitating seminars for educators who are bringing conversations about race and racism into their classrooms and schools.

Target Groups

Teachers, principals/division heads, those who oversee and implement curricula

Content Areas

Design or offer professional development for faculty who are at different stages of racial equity work.
Collaborating with a team of educators to design and implement any of the following:

  • Curricular approach.
  • Scope and sequence of racial equity work.
  • Classroom lessons.
  • Deciding what to teach when you can’t teach everything.
  • Anticipating student reactions: what works, what doesn’t, and what happens in the room in real life?

 

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Nikki Butts

Nikki Butts

NIkki is an expert strategist, researcher, and analyst with a proven track record of helping schools reach their goals. Her unique approach helps school leaders solve their most complex challenges by asking the right questions, conducting research and analysis, and turning insights into results-oriented actions. As the former Assistant Head of Schools for Advancement at The Children’s School in Atlanta, GA, Nikki led strategic priorities with the board of directors to optimize enrollment, market positioning, and pricing strategy. As Director of Admission at Hillbrook School, she led and achieved the school’s plan to increase enrollment. With a focus on financial vitality, enrollment growth, and enrollment management, Nikki supports schools in thinking through the current and potential future diversity of their student population. 

Target Groups

Admission and Retention professionals, Advancement professionals, assistant heads, associate heads, and heads of school.

Content Areas

  • Current and potential future diversity of student population.
  • Market positioning.
  • Internal policies and practices required to create cultures of belonging.

Learn more about Nikki here.

 

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Tonda Case

Tonda Case

Tonda has over 30 years of experience building diverse, welcoming, equitable communities and workplaces. Her strength and success lie in her ability to frame, elevate and hold central "the human" in the work of building dynamic praxis-based relationships, teams, communities, policies, curriculum and strategies.

Target Groups

Faculty and leadership

Content Areas

  • Supporting Students of Color and Their Families: Welcoming, Nurturing and Belonging.
  • Creating Intersectional and Diverse Imagery, Stories, Experiences: Creating More Inclusive Curriculum.
  • Reframing Our Humanity: Speaking with Students, Parents and the School Community About Race.
  • Uncovering Bias: Faculty, Staff, Policies, Processes and Community.

 

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Nishant Mehta

Nishant Mehta

With his background and experience as a former head of school and current or former trustee of NAIS, NBOA, and CSEE, Nishant now coaches and facilitates meaningful dialogue and discussions for leadership teams and boards of trustees interested in amplifying their attention and intentions on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over the course of two decades, Nishant has led regional and national workshops like NAIS’s POCC and SDLC, keynoted conferences, and launched or facilitated sessions at leadership institutes like NAIS’s Diversity Leadership Institute (DLI) that empower marginalized groups to use their voice to lead and effect change in their schools.

Target Groups

Leadership teams, heads of school, or heads together with trustees

Content Areas

  • Strategy and prioritization of racial equity work to set your community up for success.
  • Build and sustain momentum when engaging the broader community.
  • Scaffold our next 6 months of racial equity work.
  • Troubleshoot, reframe, and/or reprioritize racial equity work.

Learn more about Nishant here.

 

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Jessy Molina

Jessy Molina

Jessy is a nationally recognized trainer and facilitator on issues of diversity, equity, and social justice. Most recently, Jessy Molina served as the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice at Friends School of Baltimore. She has supported people to connect with one another and make social change through her work with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco, the John Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right, and Welcoming America. Prior to working at Friends, Jessy served as the Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Garrison Forest School. She has facilitated meaningful dialogue in communities across the country on race and racism, immigration, the criminal justice system, public and private education, policing, ethics and values, and more. Jessy serves as a mentor for trainers and facilitators in the Baltimore/Washington D.C region. 
Jessy graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and lives in Baltimore with her husband, Michael, and two children. Popular workshops Jessy is asked to facilitate include Reducing the Impact of Implicit Bias on our Decision-Making, Interrupting Microaggressions in the Classroom, Effective Strategies for Talking about Race and Racism in the Classroom, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Interrupting Bias in Hiring, and Effective Strategies for Recruiting, Hiring and Retaining Faculty and Staff of Color.

 

Target Groups

Leadership teams, supervisors, full faculty, heads of school, families, boards

Content Areas

  • An experienced facilitator, Jessy has trained thousands of people at nonprofits, companies, law firms, schools, colleges and universities, and other institutions to recognize and dismantle bias, develop the language and courage to discuss race, create equitable policies and practices, explore the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, gender identity, religion, culture and more, and begin building a more just world.
  • Jessy has also developed a model of facilitated dialogue that builds understanding and connection between people and communities who are divided by tension, conflict, and misunderstanding.
  • She also trains others to facilitate courageous conversations and equity seminars in their communities.
  • Workshop for parents on how to talk about race with your K-5 children.
  • Workshop for board leadership on the role of board trustees in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice work.

Learn more about Jessy here.

 

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Rivka Press Schwartz

Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz

Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz currently serves as Associate Principal, General Studies and co-Director of Machon Siach at SAR High School in the Bronx, New York. Formerly Director of General Studies at The Frisch School, she is a Fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and has spent more than 15 years in the field of Jewish secondary and post secondary education including serving as an adjunct professor of history at Yeshiva University and Stern Colleges. Rivka earned a Ph.D. in History of Science from Princeton University, writing her dissertation about the cultural history of the Manhattan Project. She lectures widely on issues of contemporary importance in the Orthodox community.

Target Audience

Full faculty, classroom teachers, administrators, parents, board members

Content Areas

  • Why do we need to have a conversation about race and what’s getting in the way?
  • What is an Orthodox school’s point of entry into work that’s focused on the impact and importance of race in Jewish education?
  • Curricular review and guidance.

 

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Yoshi Silverstein

Yoshi Silverstein

Yoshi Silverstein (he/him) is the founder and Executive Director of Mitsui Collective. a Chinese-Ashkenazi-American Jew and an educator, designer, speaker, husband, and father. A multidisciplinary practitioner of embodied creative and spiritual expression, he is a recipient of the 2022 Pomegranate Prize for emerging leaders in Jewish education from the Covenant Foundation, and was selected as a 2021 “Grist 50 Fixer” building a more just and equitable future. Yoshi earned his Masters Degree in Landscape Architecture at University of Maryland with a thesis exploring Jewish landscape journey and experience, and holds certificates in spiritual entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, permaculture design, and environmental education. Yoshi sits on the Board of Directors for Repair the World as program committee chair, and is Cleveland community organizer for Edot: The Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity and Racial Justice Collaborative. An adjunct faculty instructor at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and program faculty at M² Institute for Experiential Jewish Education, Cornerstone Seminar (Foundation for Jewish Camp), Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and Avodah’s Institute for Social Change, Yoshi is also a Senior Schusterman Fellow, and is a student of Resmaa Menakem in the areas of embodied antiracism and somatic abolitionism.

Mitsui Collective offers embodied Jewish learning for both programs crafted entirely by Mitsui Collective and those infused into larger programs such as national conferences, professional trainings, regional convenings, fellowship seminars, and consultation on areas relating to our core areas of work.

Our work centers embodied Jewish practice and somatic antiracism. We also offer expertise in Jewish program design, community building, and experiential learning and leadership pedagogies.

Target Audience

Full faculty, early childhood/science/farm/outdoor/experiential/physical education/health and wellness educators

Content Areas

  • Embodied Jewish Leadership and Building Antiracist Culture —  build understanding of somatic responses to external conditions, and practices for building somatic awareness and responsiveness to stress, both from a broad lens and then specifically in the context of addressing the impacts of racism and utilizing somatic awareness and practice to build antiracist culture in Jewish organizational and communal environments.
  • Addressing Racism From the Inside Out — Utilizing a combination of somatic practices alongside “traditional” text, content-based learning, and discussion to more fully address both the impacts of racism and effective tools for moving towards antiracist practice.
  • Us and Us: Centering the Margins of Racial Identity in the Jewish Climate Movement — As Jews, when we discuss “environmental racism,” conversations and learning often fall into the paradigm of framing the conversation as “Us” (Jews) and “Them” (People of Color). As you consider your school farm, natural spaces, and science/history curricula, learn the experiences of Jews of Color working at the intersections of nature connection, environmental activism, farming, service, and Jewish education in order to consider  relationships and practices both external and internal to Jewish community so that we can actualize a green and equitable future.
  • Programs and Community Building for Multiracial / Multicultural Jews & Jewish Families: Get input on your own program and community building initiatives for multiracial and multicultural Jews and their families.

 

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Tema Smith

Tema Smith

Tema is dedicated to building a meaningful and inclusive Jewish community through research, training, writing and relational engagement work. She is currently the Director, Jewish Outreach & Partnerships at the Anti-Defamation League, and was previously the Director of Professional Development at 18Doors and the Director of Community Engagement at Holy Blossom Temple. 

Target Groups

Full-faculty professional development, DEI committees, leadership teams, heads of school and/or principals

Content Areas

Jews, Race, and Diversity: I work with Jewish organizations to explore barriers to participation for racially and ethnically diverse Jews and work to make our institutions represent the full diversity of the Jewish people.

Learn more about Tema here.

 

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Sirida Terk

Sirida Terk

Guided by the lessons of my personal racialized experience growing up with mixed heritage in the South, and informed by an intersectional perspective, as a Jewish woman of color, and an interdisciplinary background in Humanities, my goal is to prepare school communities to interact meaningfully with a diverse outside world by developing students equipped to challenge bias and injustice where they see it. With over twenty years as an educator in the fields of social science and literature and almost a decade of that in a Jewish day school, I am familiar with this arena and the unique challenges and opportunities it presents. With George Floyd's killing, the subsequent protest movement, and the reflecting that we're doing as a society, I find myself in the unique position of educating both adults and children about the history of race in America. I've made a point of shaping our curriculum to examine identity, explore diverse voices and perspectives, enhance cultural awareness, and highlight the parallels of racial supremacy in goal, application, and impact wherever and whenever it has reared its head.

Target Groups

Teachers and broader staff/faculty, parents, community members

Content Areas

  • Help to create secure spaces for engagement outside the classroom, provide effective vocabulary and frameworks for community stakeholders to engage in meaningful and challenging discourse, and strengthen the home/school connection. I also facilitate community learning events. Sessions include: Parent/Staff/Faculty/Community Panels: Understanding the Community Cultural Wealth of Students and Families.
  • Because there are patterns of human behavior that recur in different eras or contexts, particularly in the United States, I can offer a dynamic approach to exploring the connection between historic events and present-day impact. Sessions include: The History of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Dynamic Tension of Jewish Response to the Call for Racial Justice, and Redlining and Economic Segregation.
  • Work with faculty to develop their own identity awareness, a better understanding of DEI(J) concepts, and a common language to use. Session include: Preparing to be an Ally Inside and Outside of the Workplace and Doing the Internal Work: Racial Identity Development.