| dc.description.abstract | The Adelaide L. Sanford Institute (ASI) was formed in 2006. ASI aims to arm educators of all races with the understanding and tools necessary to implement culturally relevant pedagogy. They seek to support educators to feel empowered to challenge the dominant Eurocentric narrative that Central Brooklyn students commonly encounter in schools. Now more than ever, educators of all races have a social responsibility to address issues of white supremacy and systemic racism brought forward by reenergized civil rights movements after the brutal murder of George Floyd by a police officer (Eichstaedt el al., 2021). Black students need educators who can understand that many Black children viewed the video of George Floyd’s murder and saw themselves on the ground being kneeled on at the neck until their demise.
ASI has a passionate volunteer staff who are eager to support educators but their limited budget has hindered their ability to hire paid staff members to perform key roles essential to its daily functioning. ASI workforce is comprised of all volunteer members. All ASI staff members except for one retiree, work full-time jobs of at least forty hours each week. This leads to members prioritizing their paid work commitments over their volunteer duties for ASI. ASI identifies a lack of funding as their main area of concern. Funders typically require the organization hoped to gain funding, to design an evaluation tool that can capture the impact of their program. However, data has not been collected or stored systematically in a way that ASI can use for evaluative purposes. Therefore, creating evaluative measures to showcase the meaningful work of ASI was the next best step towards persuading funders to support their program. In this capstone, I highlight the importance of culturally relevant teaching practices and Afrocentric pedagogy coupled with ASI’s contributions to participants’ practice of implementing culturally relevant teaching practices. I also propose evaluative measures that can be used to gain funding.
For this project design, I analyzed qualitative data from a 2021 survey of conference attendees and conducted interviews with past conference attendees to obtain further qualitative data. The qualitative data was then analyzed according to Creswell’s Model of Qualitative Data Analysis.
Although ASI struggles with their human capital, their volunteer staff is eager to complete actionable items that will yield positive results with minimal effort such a creating a Facebook page, newsletter and google folder. I also noted in the finding section of this project that finding a well-matched funding source can have a positive impact on ASI. Once ASI produces data by using an adapted Kirkpatrick model to evaluate their program, they will be in a better position to apply for government funding from agencies that support the efforts of their organization. | |
