Ashoka
The Academy for Global Citizenship is a Chicago Public Charter School, located on the underserved Southwest side of Chicago. AGC’s innovative and holistic approach to education aims to foster systemic change and inspire the way society educates our future generations. AGC is producing a replicable model for learning in the 21st century, including the construction of a net-positive energy campus. AGC respects and embraces the innate curiosity of children, the natural systems of the world and the responsibility to make positive change.
Jenni Schneiderman
Jenni recounts her family’s story of losing her dad from brain cancer ten years ago. At 16, her perspective was mostly centered on her own experience of loss: i.e., the imagined absence of her dad at her high school graduation, college commencement, future wedding, and the birthday parties of her own children one day. She struggled to relate to her peers in suburbia and in the beginning months of college. Late in Jenni’s freshman year, she met a senior, who started a student group that organized social support and weekend retreats for young children who had experienced profound loss. She was looking for a successor; Jenni was looking for meaningful community involvement. For her remaining years at Kenyon, Jenni dedicated free time to collaborating with social workers at Hospice of Knox County to orchestrate the evolution of the program. With more, emotional and thought space available and through the trusting relationships she cultivated with the children, Jenni began to internalize the heightened challenges these families faced due to socio-economic position. This revelation – one greater than her own experience of grief – pushed Jenni beyond the
weight of own pain. After a year in Argentina on a Fulbright ETA working with students and living with their families, Jenni moved to Chicago to work with Mexican immigrant families and learn more about the Chicago Public School System. Similar to her experience with the Hospice families while at Kenyon, Jenni found herself mesmerized by the stories, celebrations, dreams, and all-embracing love of the abuelitos – like her own Grandma Bev and Grandpa Hank. Over countless dinner table conversations and cafes con leche, Jenni learned about their life struggles around immigration, job security, healthcare and school system navigation, and “success” orientation. The combination of the collecting of these intimate stories, her deepened understanding of the systemic inequity that manifests in our public health, education, and immigration systems and self-reflection on her own privileged upbringing motivates Jenni to become an advocate and powerful force of change.
