August 20, 2024 • 36 mins
"There's more to me than you can see"
It is only human to hide behind a mask. In this episode, Lisa speaks with Ashanti Branch, Educator, Mentor and Founder of the Ever Forward Club, who has spent decades mentoring young men of color, building trust, and bringing confidence and empathy into their lives to help them achieve their true potential. Through his more recent project, the Million Mask Movement, we learn how sharing “our masks” help us to gather a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and how connected we really are when it comes to the masks we live in.
Ashanti Branch is a master in building healthy relationships in schools, a pioneer in education reform, and in youth mental health, with over 18 years of experience. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Ever Forward Club (EFC), a non-profit organization dedicated to seeing marginalized students graduate high school by providing them with emotional tools and mental health support. Ashanti is a keynote speaker, advisor to the US Surgeon General, a Fulbright Fellow, and 4x Tedx Speaker and has created the global #MillionMaskMovement
Resources from today's episode:
Million Mask Movement: millionmask.org
Ever Forward Club: https://everforwardclub.org/
Sticks and Stones E70 with Ashanti Branch(SPECIAL EPISODE)
A young man reflects after his first ‘Taking off the Mask’ workshop. "I Remember I Went Back" | Taking Off The Mask | Branch Speaks https://youtu.be/qIPbNrGoxxs
TEDx Marin - The Masks We All Wear
Wisdom 2.0 - Ashanti Branch and young men from The Ever Forward Club speak about growing up as young men today - https://youtu.be/8bPOd2Esbrk
Ashanti Branch speaks about young men's emotional toolbox at Big Ideas Fest 2014 - http://youtu.be/sGzauoDEEVk
The Ever Forward Club's work is featured in a documentary by The Representation Project called "The Mask You Live In" that premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival http://youtu.be/hc45-ptHMxo
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
(Transcribed by Sonix.ai - Remove this message by upgrading your Sonix account) Welcome to Educating to Be Human, a podcastwhere we'll explore what it means to be human
in today's world at the intersection ofeducation, technology and culture.
I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of theInstitute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education.
Each week, I'll speak with people who aresupporting transformative change in
(00:29):
education today, that is, ordinary peoplecreating extraordinary impact.
Thank you very much for listening.
In this episode of Educating to Be Human, Ihave the pleasure of speaking with Ashante
(00:52):
branch. He's a former math teacher inOakland, California, and he's founder of the
Ever Forward Club.
Now Ashanti's classroom experience led himto see how the bright young men he taught
were not thriving, and he took it uponhimself to better understand how the
challenges in their personal lives kept themfrom making school a priority.
(01:15):
So, as founder of the Million Mask Movement,Ashanti leads a powerful initiative aimed at
helping young men, especially young men ofcolor, to better understand the metaphorical
masks they hide behind so as not tooutwardly express their fears and emotions.
So, through the development of an anonymousmask creation activity, which we'll hear more
(01:40):
about later, these young men are given thespace and the encouragement to express their
full selves, and in doing so, they're ableto better understand, share, and support
their struggles with others.
So in this episode, we talk about Ashanti'sjourney, the future of the Million Masks
(02:01):
Project, and the powerful impact of creatinga more authentic and supportive world for our
youth and for each other.
So let's go behind the mask.
Hi, Ashanti. Welcome!
I'd love to start today by asking you aboutwhat the Ever Forward Club is and a little
bit about your start as a teacher.
Yeah. Thank you.
(02:22):
You know, I was a first year teacher.
I had just left my engineering career, andmy vision was in life to be rich.
And when teaching called me, I ran from it.
And so the fact that I was finding myself,you know, day one in this classroom with
these students scared out of my mind, like,what's going to happen next?
I was clear that I was there for a reason.
(02:43):
I didn't know the only reason at the moment,I didn't know the reason at the moment, but I
deeply felt like there's a calling happeningin my life.
And so I began teaching at San Lorenzo HighSchool, and I saw, like, really smart young
men failing my class.
Like, I was like, wait a minute, you'resmart.
I can tell you're smart. I can see it inyou.
You're maybe trying to hide it from others,but I can tell, like in just the context and
(03:07):
how quickly you pick up on things like.
But school wasn't cool to a lot of studentswho I saw.
And I had kind of forgotten what it was liketo be a student who wanted to be cooler than
I wanted to be smart.
And I was like, what's going on here?
And it wasn't until I just decided thateither I'm leaving teaching because I'm
failing. I'm doing a horrible job.
(03:28):
If smart kids are failing my class and Ithink I'm smart, like, why are we creating
failures? So the vision was I was going toleave, but I was like trying one last thing.
I mean, I went back to school to do thisprofession that I thought was calling me, and
I'm doing bad at it. And I think otherteachers were like, well, you'll get good at
it. Just give it a couple of years.
I'm like, wait, you mean I got to be brokeand a failure for a couple of years?
(03:50):
I mean, I knew I was going to sign up to bebroke, you know, but I didn't sign up to be a
failure. And that's how it all started.
And so I invited them out to lunch.
I said, look, I'll buy you lunch once aweek.
In exchange for lunch,uring those lunchsessions, I want you to teach me how to be a
better teacher. Like, what am I doing wrong?
Like, let's let's let's learn about eachother.
But also I want you to figure out, help mefigure out how I can make school better for
(04:12):
you, because it doesn't make sense thatyou're not doing well.
Now, some of the students in our club, theyweren't all failing classes.
Some of them, just their social capital waschallenged.
So they were great academically, butsocially they were either in a shell or they
were like shot.
Like whatever it was, I just saw somethingamazing in those young men.
And so that's how it all started.
So that was 2004.
(04:33):
You know, this is our 20th year anniversary.
I'll fast forward you really far to 2015.
We were featured in a documentary called TheMask You Live In.
And the reason I'm fast forwarding there's alot more in between there, but just to name
it. What I didn't know in the beginning,when I started the documentary filmed us, was
that I was talking about the masks, youknow, back in 2004, but I just wasn't using
(04:54):
the metaphor of a mask.
I knew there was something going on withthose students that were like showing this
thing on the outside, but there was moregoing on on the inside.
And I think it took, you know, that first 11years to kind of like come to a place of
being able to explain it in a clean, clear,concise way of what I was seeing.
And that's how it all happened.
You came to Big Ideas Fest some years ago anddid this amazing session for us on taking off
(05:20):
the Mask, and I've since experienced it inother venues and know that you've been doing
this around the world.
And so maybe tell us a little bit morereally about the masks and what that what
that is. You just alluded to it, but tell uswhat it means to take off the mask and a
little bit about about what you do in that.
Yeah. So what I have been seeing over those11 years of what I was doing at Everforward,
(05:43):
let's say I saw smart young men not showinghow smart they were before, ever before it
started. I had forgotten that I used to dothat in middle school.
When I got to high school, I was already ontrack.
So when I'm teaching these students and I'mlike, dude, why are you, why are you, why
would you rather have a fight with me or anargument with me than just to let me support
you? I'm not your enemy.
(06:03):
Maybe you have enemies out here.
Maybe there's enemies in your community.
But I'm not one of them.
I want you to be your best.
And I think what I saw in them was, there'sa certain way I have to show up in life.
And I think the mask is like, you put onthis mask.
There's what the character is in that mask.
If you've ever been in a theater class,maybe they even practice with masks.
(06:23):
They say, hey, take this mask and act likethis character.
And you just you get to put on this persona.
It's what I want people to see about me.
It's what I let people see.
And when you think about Behind the mask,it's the things I don't let people see.
I don't talk about.
There's one mask that most people won't beable to see it, but I'm going to have you
describe it. So basically it's a circle witha smiley face.
And then there's four words on the front ofthe mask.
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It says happy, smart, outgoing and caring.
That's what this young man This is from ayoung man.
Shows on the front of the mask is anonymous.
I don't know who it belongs to, but I willnever forget it.
When I first opened it up and I saw it.
And on the back of this mask, if you look,there's a bunch of words written in the same
(07:09):
word, written 18 times.
And that word is anger.
Anger. Yeah
Anger. And when I saw this, it not only,like, stopped me in my tracks, I literally
just stared at it for a long time andrealized how many of our young men are
walking around happy, smart, outgoing andcaring on the outside.
Yet what they're not talking about, whatthey're not showing, is that they're carrying
(07:32):
around a load of anger, or replace that wordwith any other emotion you can think of.
And I think that that is what I began to seehappening in schools.
I began to see also, what happens in schoolsis a context of like, if I am in a certain
school environment and let's say I go to theoffice and I tell the somebody in the office.
(07:55):
They say office people who are there doingtheir job, they're busy.
They're just navigating the day.
I come in and say, hey, I'm feeling sad,worried and stressed.
And they're like, well, maybe, you know,just don't worry so much.
Don't stress so much, don't think so muchand go back to class, right.
Because our schools are designed or theymay, like somebody in the office may say, you
know what, actually we have a counselor overhere.
(08:17):
Now, let's say you go see the counselor.
There's another scenario.
Oh, do you have insurance?
Go have your parents fill out this paperworkso then we can talk, because now there's a
there's a thing that's in the way of this.
And maybe I can't tell my parents because myparents don't believe in that.
So therefore, now I'm stuck.
So they need they need the permission fromtheir parents to to be able to talk to the
(08:37):
school counselor.
That's right. The rule that school has inplace.
But let's say because no one in the officeis there, let me just have a chat with you
and see how you're doing. I mean, if youtold me that if somebody told me that a
friend of mine told me, I'm like, hey,what's on your mind?
I would ask that question, but if you're ina school where you got hundreds of kids
running around and some kids comes in, ifyou're not careful, you can go through the
rigid process and miss the heart.
(08:58):
And let's say that same kid two days laterpunches some kid in PE because he talked
about him. He said something to them, didsomething to them.
That kid comes back to the office now.
That kid now has done an act that we knowwhat to do with schools, know what to do with
a kid who has physically assaulted anotherkid, because we have a rule book and it says:
you hit somebody, it can be this consequenceor this consequence or this consequence up to
(09:21):
a suspension for multiple days.
Now, the kid who came in two days agotelling you they was worried and stressed, we
had nothing for them necessarily when thatwas what it was.
But now that I've done something, now we gota consequence.
And the consequence is not getting yousupport about the worry and stress that you
were feeling already is to just deal withthe symptom of what you have now expressed on
(09:42):
the outside. And I think that what I saw inever forward with the mask was sometimes
young people don't even know how to ask forhelp when they're feeling stressed, worried
and sad. We have some work to do around thatsocial emotional development in young people.
And so that's why that's why we created themask activity.
It's anonymous. Right. It's like but if wecan get a litmus test to say, oh, this is
what's happening. There are students at thisschool who are walking around writing angry
(10:07):
18 times on the back of this idea of a mask.
We probably should talk about anger.
Anger. How do you how do you navigate anger?
How do you navigate stress?
How do you navigate sadness?
How do you when do schools teach thoseclasses?
It almost rarely ever happens.
Right, so tell me how this work of taking offthe mask was integrated?
Was it started actually within the EverForward club.
(10:29):
And then how has it evolved over time?
This work just seems so phenomenallyimportant to what we're seeing today, and
it's hard to believe that every schoolwouldn't want a program like this.
Yeah, I think that one of the things I saw isthat when we did the activity that first time
in the documentary, I didn't know it wasgoing to work.
(10:49):
I was working with a group of young men atFremont High School in Oakland who were
struggling, and I had tried all of my bestactivities with them.
You know, I had been doing ever forward, youknow, almost nine years by that time, ten
years. And I'm like, okay, let's do thisactivity and that activity and that.
And nothing was working with these youngmen.
I mean, they were resistant.
Anything that had to do with talking aboutfeelings was a barrier.
(11:11):
And I was like, what is going on?
Now I'm the dean that year, so I'm dealingwith students, when they get kicked out of
class, I'm dealing with them. When they'recutting class in the hallway, I'm dealing
with them when they're caught smoking overthere behind the gym.
I'm I'm dealing with all this stuff.
But they weren't talking about what theywere really going through.
And what I realized right away was my job asan educator was like, learn the deeper what
(11:32):
was happening. So when they asked me to be apart of this documentary, I said, look, these
young men in this club, they don't open up.
Like I began building a club there, but itwas not our official program.
It was a little it was a hybrid of what ournormal club was.
What I what I began to see when I askedthese young men to not talk about it, just to
write it. Don't put your name on it.
(11:53):
Anonymous. When we did that activity in thedocumentary, like when I'm in the room with
him, I'm literally waiting for an argumentto start because anytime we ask them about
how they feel, somebody is going to startdoing something to distract the room because
they had a fear or a barrier or some kind ofa built in rule system that said, don't talk
(12:14):
about feelings. And so they resisted.
And what I found was that when they whenthey took these pieces of paper and they
balled them up and they threw them at eachother, and when they opened up, they got a
new one and they opened it up.
It wasn't their paper, it was somebodyelse's in that room paper.
And they realized, oh, wow.
When they heard the words of the young menin that room hearing what's on the front and
(12:34):
what's on the back, they were like the roomdropped into a place I had never seen before.
And I think that is the opportunity.
And it was a clarity like, oh, okay, now Iwas in the room when it first happened, but
it wasn't almost until and I started makingmasks with people on a smaller scale.
(12:55):
But when I went to the documentary to see it,The Mask You Live In, and sat in that chair
and watched it, that's when I saw it, right?
Like I had been experiencing it.
But it was another thing when I was sittingin that chair and I'm literally like, I, I
cried in there because I saw things in theroom that I didn't see where I was sitting
from my vantage point, and I was like, oh mygoodness.
(13:18):
And I was clear at that point that this isexactly where we're going next.
The just the giving it a name, a metaphor,giving it a room.
Anonymous. Giving it space to talk about itand not having to like feel like the light is
on me. Made it so much easier for young mento be able to talk about it, and made it
(13:38):
easier for people to be able to say, ohyeah, I get that.
Oh man, I experienced that too.
And so that's the the tagline.
There's more to me than you can see.
You know, there's more to you than I can seeby looking at you.
And so when we can be, when we can hold thatcontext.
I think more people need to be aware of thatcontext, but hold that context.
I think we can do so much more.
(13:59):
You know.
I'd love to hear a little more about thisproject in action and its impact on the young
men you work with.
Yeah, I have seen this concept provide spaceand room for young men and all students
because now it's a global campaign.
I work originally began with just young men,but what I've seen it do is create space for
(14:24):
people to just get clear that it's not justme.
Now, that's easy to say.
You're not alone, right? That's a tagline.
It's a hashtag. It's t shirts.
It's. You're not alone, right?
It's all the things that you're not alonefits under in the world.
But there's a deeper place of, like, reallyseeing it, feeling it, hearing it,
understanding it. And I think what we see inthe work with the masks, like the first
(14:47):
workshop that we did when the movement beganto grow.
So when I started realizing that thisactivity was the activity that we were going
to, like, put out in the world, we gotinvited to a conference.
One of my team members, a young man who hasbeen a part of our work, we go to this hotel
in Burlingame.
We're getting ready for the workshop at 7:00in the morning, getting everything ready.
Hey, where are the masks?
(15:09):
Because in the documentary, I make copies ofthese masks.
So I have made copies of a bunch of thesemasks.
And we get to the hotel.
There's no mask.
Now, he and I had a longer talk, but I'lljust say right now he had two jobs.
Markers and masks.
Markers and masks.
And there's no mask.
I'm like how how are we going to do a maskworkshop with no masks?
(15:31):
And so in this moment, I'm like, I'll godown to the copy center.
I don't know if you've ever been to too manyhotels, copy centers.
Most times they're average at best.
This one had no copy machine that wasworking.
They said you can make two copies or fivecopies.
Whatever it was, it was not going to be 80that I needed.
And I'm like oh my God, there's no Kinko'splace, there's no print shop nearby.
(15:51):
And my brain is like, okay, we got invitedto do this workshop.
We're we're what are we going to do?
So that was the first day I went to thefront desk.
I said, do you have any paper?
Can I have some paper? That's how thedrawing started.
That's how the drawing started, becauseoriginally I had just in the documentary, I
printed masks. It was just a random maskonline.
I just printed it and then I was like, shesaid, well, we can't give you any of these
paper because we need it for these machines.
(16:13):
But I can give you this big paper.
I'm like, I'll take whatever you can give me.
So she gave me this 11 by 17 paper.
I have them still here somewhere.
This is this is 2014.
I think it was. I don't remember how whatyear, but 2014 around.
She hands me these big 11 by 17 pieces ofpaper and I'm like, we gotta work with it.
And literally I remember, you know, there'sa snowball fight happens after they ball
(16:33):
these pieces of paper. These were like snowglobes, people.
I said, listen, these are the biggest piecesof paper we've ever worked with.
So please don't don't hurt nobody.
Right. But it was like, that's the firsttime.
And when I went home that night and I openedall these pieces of paper up and I smashed
them down and I was like, this is amazing.
And that's when I knew that it wasn't goingto be any more of me ever printing masks.
(16:55):
It was going to be me giving people justpermission and the space to draw their own
mask. We're we're at about 80.
We have it's called the Million Mask Movie.
We have a long way to go. We're at about 80plus thousand right now, and it's been just a
amazing journey of watching what gets drawn.
So tell me about the Million Mask Movement.
(17:16):
So you have 80,000.
We're going to get to a million.
How's that going to happen? And what's goingto happen in our communities as we're doing
this?
Yeah. You know, now that I'm starting to seethat we're going to start telling the story
along the way. So we get this first researchpaper coming out.
We're going to ideally produce two moreresearch papers in the summer.
Really looking at the data that we'relearning.
This first one is about two sophomoreclasses at two different schools, a private
(17:40):
school and a public school.
And looking at those masks, the next onewill probably be about young men and you
know, I don't we haven't figured out theyoung men are going to help create the topic.
Like, who are we going to look at?
And then we're going to do probably one morethis summer.
So we're going to start telling some of thestories we're learning.
We've been sharing masks on social media,but I think even sharing masks, people aren't
(18:02):
they're not it's not as compelling as Ithought it would be, even though the images
are very compelling to me.
So we're really always we're constantly justtesting the water, like, what is what message
needs to be out there? And since most of ourwork is in education, we're going to start
sharing who's struggling in our schools.
We know that our young men, our boys arestruggling, and not that the only ones
struggling, but they are struggling.
(18:22):
And so we're going to start really kind oflike honing in on some of those, you know,
middle aged boys, middle school, highschool, and maybe start with a middle school
group, you know, 11 to 14 and then 14 and 18or those groups are like, what are we seeing?
What are they telling us? Because they'reputting compelling words on those cards.
And so that's the next step.
I was worried for a long time, like, why isit taking so long to get to a million?
(18:44):
Like, isn't this an amazing idea?
That's what people say about their ideas,right?
This is an amazing idea.
But I realized that okay, we're going to getthere eventually.
Right now, let's start telling the storiesof what we're learning.
And I didn't think about that in thebeginning because I wasn't creating it with
the end in mind. I was creating it for whatI was, what I was serving right here in the
present moment, you know?
(19:04):
Yeah. I think the story is about what you'relearning are are so important to understand
now because you're really trying to educatepeople, right?
Educators and other young people about howour young people in need, and our at risk
students, how they're trying to navigatethis world that they're experiencing.
Right. So you're trying to create this, thishuman conversation among people.
(19:26):
And it seems like when they're in thosegroups, that's when they're really having
that connection. Maybe it doesn't surpriseme as much as it's harder than you thought on
social media, although I don't know how muchyou've done with TikTok or something like
that, but certainly just posting a pictureof a mask is not the same experience of
actually, you know, being in a room andhaving this human connection and and taking
(19:47):
your mask and crumpling it in a little balland then having a snowball fight with them
across, you know, across a room, across aclassroom, across a ballroom, whatever it is.
So I can see how this next step really hasto be about telling, showing the data,
telling the stories.
What have you learned?
How are you going to do that differentlynow?
What are you thinking?
(20:08):
Yeah, well, one of the things I think aswe're in this next phase, as we're telling
more of the stories, is as we share masks,as we invite young people to be a part of it.
So we're building out our young men's core.
That's going to be starting this summer.
That'll be the first group that will gothrough this social Emotional Leadership
academy this summer.
They're part of their job is going to bethey'll be on 3 or 4 teams and one of the
(20:32):
teams. Their job is to figure out what do weneed to do, not only to encourage more young
people to participate, but what do we needto do to engage the communities in this tool?
So we're we're going to put it in the handsof youth.
Right. I've been using my old ideas, my oldideas for all this time.
(20:53):
And now it's like, okay, we need to get theyoung people involved.
One thing we're really excited about, we hadthree sets of our young men who went with us
to South by Southwest for this pop up thatwe had, we had our big booth.
It was a beautiful experience.
Those young men, their role was to be a partof this mental health action day, which was
last week. Four of them ignited pop ups attheir school events.
(21:17):
Actually five, five, five and one is stillin the process because he's going to do it
between now and the end of the year.
So it was an opportunity for them to like,take it and have the have the positive
experience or even the challengingexperience of what does it look like for me
to go out into the world to then deliverthis thing that I know about, I understand
it, how do I talk to other young people?
(21:37):
And I think through their experience ofthis, it is going to help them.
And they at South by Southwest, they wereamazing, but they were talking to a lot of
adults. I think it's sometimes easier foryoung people to talk to adults relatively,
than to talk to their own peers.
And so when they can find out the best wordsto encourage their peers to take this
anonymous tool.
Three steps, six words, it's easy to say noto this.
(22:01):
Why do you want me to do that? It's easy tosay no because if.
But how do you help them be able to find thewords to explain to their peers?
So then their peers gets the chance to be apart of what we grow out of it.
So I'm super excited.
I think that that's the next step is gettingthe young people involved.
But also as I'm as a, you know, a leader ofthis movement and trying to really raise the
(22:21):
funds for it and raise awareness about it.
You know. You just said a phrase a littlewhile back, and we haven't said it directly,
but this work is really about mentalwellness, right?
It's about mental health.
And I don't know that you started that way,but maybe it's just because now we have
social emotional learning as as words thatwe understand stand in our education systems.
(22:45):
I mean, that really seems to be the crux ofwhat you're talking about.
And yet there seems to still be a stigmaabout about mental health.
And maybe you could talk a little bit aboutthat so we understand that better.
Yeah. So this this topic is personal to me inlots of ways.
And I'll say the first way is personal to meis I have a brother who has paranoid
(23:06):
schizophrenia. We didn't know about itgrowing up.
He had ear infections.
He had he had tubes in his ears.
He had a lot of some health issues.
He was taking a lot of medicine growing up.
He had seizures.
And so he got he grew up, and he ended upgetting himself in trouble.
He ended up in jail for something kind ofsmall.
But then he began in jail.
(23:27):
He began to do all these ridiculousbehaviors in jail.
So he kept getting more time, like somethingthat should have been six months turned into
years and years and years.
And it was a behaviors that was happening inthere.
But he was in general population.
He wasn't tested. No one had tested him.
But my brother has a mental healthdisability.
And and it wasn't until they got him testedthat figured out he had schizophrenia.
(23:49):
Then. Then they moved him to the the rightplace, a place that the men's colony in
Atascadero. That's the place where folkswith mental illness usually get the support,
so they not only get the medicine they need,but they get the support they need while they
do whatever sentence they have.
And my brother should have been out of jailway longer before that, but he was never
diagnosed. I'm naming that context because.
(24:09):
So when I found out that it happened with mybrother, I was like, okay, well, how do we
get him the support he needs?
Right. And it's so it's hard.
It's hard work. It's hard work because hehas a mind of his own.
He's he's he's brilliant.
He's smart. But he also has this thesechallenges that come up from time to time.
And you never know when they're going toshow up.
Right. And so that's the one way it'spersonal.
(24:29):
And I'll say the second way is personal ismy godson.
They just found my godson in Los Angeles.
He he was unresponsive and he died.
And my godson had bipolar disorder and hewas going through it.
He was young.
I want to say he probably was in his early20s, 24, maybe 25.
(24:51):
And I think that here's what I know is thata person who cares about my brother so much,
and watching how the system continues to notbe of service to him, I don't have those
skills to help my brother with the ways thathe needs help, and the system is designed to
just kind of like, get you out of theiroffice.
(25:12):
All these programs and systems and I say allof them, they're going to name all of them.
And the ones that my brother has foundhimself a part of are looking for fast
answers, quick answers. And then when thosedon't work, when the person has a little bit
of consciousness, I don't want to be, Idon't want to medicate myself.
I don't want to. Then there's like, there'sno answers.
And I think what I know with young people isthat growing up, we didn't talk about mental
(25:34):
health issues. Growing up, there was notherapists.
I don't even know when I first heard thatword.
I definitely wasn't a teenager.
I didn't even know what that meant?
There were students who were in a certainset of classes that had classes, but no one
talked to us about what was happening inthat class.
Most times, people got made fun of becauseof certain exterior behaviors that no one
(25:55):
helped educate us on.
Oh yeah, be nice. Don't make fun of them.
But not contextually.
Like, hey, this is what you should learnabout these things.
And I think this is a lack of educationaround it.
And I think that now that we're having moreconversation, you know, Mental Health Action
Day last week that we participated in wasthis beautiful concept of like, how do we go
from a concept of mental health awareness?
(26:16):
Oh, there's this thing called mental healththing and we should get help around it.
Well, how?
Well, if you and your family doesn't believein it, then where do you get the support?
If your family's not going to sign thisdocument that your school needs in order for
you to see a counselor at your school andyou know they won't sign it so you don't even
take it to them, then what do you do?
(26:37):
You just hold on to the stuff by yourselfand maybe you hold on to you get 18 or get to
college and then you can finally get somehelp.
I have met so many young men who bottledstuff up, even with me, and then I find out
later, I'm like, man, why didn't you saysomething?
And I think there's a deep fear if you ifyou know your family won't accept it.
So you don't tell them, and then you havethis mentor and then you're like, well, I
(27:01):
don't want you to think differently of me.
And so therefore I just don't say anything.
And it's like, how can you prove to somebodythat you won't think differently of them?
How can you, if they're worried aboutchanging how you see them, you see the
brilliance in them, you see the amazingnessin them.
Then it becomes really challenging for youngpeople who want the support and yet don't
(27:23):
know where to go. Because everywhere theygo, there's this, there's the roadblocks and
barriers. And so one of my young men justrecently told me that he had been having some
of these ideations, and I was like, how longhas this been going on?
He's like, for two years.
I'm like, oh man, thank you for sharing thiswith me, I said, and my my heart was like,
(27:45):
right there with him, like, man.
And also my heart was like, what did I notdo well enough to earn your trust before?
I'm so glad that you're still here.
I'm glad you finally came to me.
But what did I need to have done better?
What did I need to have said better?
What do I know?
Those are all my own things that I'm workingthrough.
But I always told him. I said, listen, I'mhere for you.
(28:06):
And I'm so glad you shared it with me.
Now our job is to do the hard work.
Now you've now let it go.
You're not carrying it by yourself anymore.
Now, how do we begin finding the support?
And sometimes that part is even hard.
And so I think that with mental health, whatwe have to do as mentors, as educators, as is
say, okay, I don't want to make this worsefor you, but sometimes things are going to
have to get a little bit messier before theycan get cleaner.
(28:28):
And so what is, you know, how do we moveforward?
What is the next opportunity here?
I mean, I'm I'm thinking about what you'vejust been talking about.
It's very it's very deep and it's the cruxof so much that is that we're seeing go go
south in our in our schools, in our societytoday.
So what is the opportunity here?
(28:48):
I mean, something like the Million Masksmovement, you know.
Yeah. It sounds nice.
Million masks movement.
Right. It's a it's a great catch phrase.
It means a lot. But I think it also could bephenomenal if we really had that kind of
understanding. And here in public education,at least in the US, we have such an
opportunity to start something like that tomake it happen.
(29:11):
Why isn't this the first thing that happenswhen you walk in the door of that school, as
opposed to what happens when you're about toget kicked out?
Yeah, thank you for that.
What we have to do with schools andeducation is we have to have quality
professional development.
Now, as a teacher for ten years, as anadministrator for three, I can name to you
(29:33):
maybe five professional developments.
I remember in those ten years of teachingand three of them because of how bad they
were. What industry?
Looks like it did 100 years ago.
And yet we would be shocked that it doesn'twork.
Schools. School.
100 years ago.
Two rows of desks.
The board in the front. Maybe there's whiteboard now.
Not chalk anymore.
Maybe there's a whiteboard and an electronicboard.
(29:55):
But it's the same. I'm gonna tell you someinformation.
In two weeks later, you tell it back to me.
I'm gonna grade you based on how well yourepeated it back to me.
And then we're gonna do the cycle all overagain, right?
Like the similar cycle over and over again.
Maybe you got a table instead of desk.
Like all these ways of, like, small littlechanges of how we have to transform our
schools. I believe that professionaldevelopment is going to be a key one.
(30:17):
And I think helping educators recognize thatyou're teaching more than a subject.
Like I went in to be a math teacher.
I was not there to start a club for youngmen who were failing math.
I was going to teach math and most teachers I heard were saying well, hey I taught it,
they didn't do the work. That's on them. And I was like, huh. I couldn't hold that
context, I didn't believe in that theory process. The one time I told students, hey,
if you don't want to do any work. Go sit in the back. And I'll teach the ones in front
who I want to teach. I said it once. I said it. After I said, and you better be back
there doing work. Because in my mind that's not a realistic solution. You mean you're
going to let him. He's not wanting to do work and you're going to just give him
permission not to do work? No, not in this class. In this class, I'm going to move you
to the front. I'm going to have you walk around with me the whole day. So I can be
on, witnessing you. All these ways that I saw schools, I think that schools need more
of that. The Million Mask Movement, it's an opportunity for schools, like you said, the
beginning of school, to say here is what is happening in this building. Of these
thousands students, five hundred students, this is what they're saying what is
happening that we can't see. Now, we can begin over this school year, to say look,
we've got 24 percent of our students talking about sadness or fear, we have 30 percent
kids saying anxiety and stress. What can we be doing weekly on posters around the
schools, on announcements in the mornings, on Friday fun days. We're gonna talk about
stress management. We're gonna learn how not to be just students of academics, we're
going to learn how to be students of human development and self worth. Because if we
don't add those things into schools we're going to continue doing what we do. We're
going to see the kids who are going to get their education, get their education. I have
plenty of kids when I was a teacher who they didn't need me. The other students. I can
deliver their homework to their house in a manila folder with a pencil. And they're not
doing no work. So imagine in the same room, same schools, same class, I'll have a
student who will make up his own work if I didn't give him any. And one that no matter
if it's delivered to them in their room, in the quiet of the evening, they're not gonna
do it. If you're a teacher and you have teach that range of students, good luck that
you're only going to teach math. You have to teach with the understanding that this world
matters more, that you matter more than the grade on the paper, but that you can do it
if you work hard. And that's the work that matters. So i think it starts with
professional development and too many schools don't do professional development.
Teachers have to go to a professional development meeting because it's in their
contract but does it have to be quality? Most teachers are at the back of the room
grading papers and somewhere in the back folding their arms and saying what the heck
is this about. And I've seen it all. And I'm clear that if we don't improve that part of
our schools, we are going to continue to think that it's gonna get better because
we're hiring poor, or we didn't you know give out any prizes during some holiday. I
think we have to help teachers become better in that way. Speaker 2: I love that. I'm
going to envision for you the first day of school where all the students come in and
the first thing they do is they do a take off the mask project. In this school, that's
the assembly. Maybe the teachers have done it in their pd, in their professional
development, before school started that year. By the way, that's how we get to a
million masks and that's how we get into, as you said, into this education system that
actually shows us what it means to be human and how we can do that and how we can create
that. Ashanti, is there anything else you want to offer or tell us or express before
we end this podcast today? Ashanti (30:28):
Yeah, I was just saying two things. The mask
movement is available to anyone around the world. You can make a mask at
millionmask.org. Millionmask.org. And it's anonymous so we invite you to make a
mistake, we invite you to share with someone. This summer we are building out a
new model so that teachers can use it and have some immediate data that pulls back to
them right away. So when you make those masks with your students, you're going to
get the data right in the minute so that you'll be like. Wow, this is happening. So
that's happening. And the second thing I will say to people is that there's a
quote we use in our work that says this, that says the longest distance that most
people travel is the 18 inches between their head and their heart. And our work is not
trying to fill people's head with more information. It's to say can you take the
journey from your head to your heart and can you realize that there's so much more to you
that anybody can see by looking at you. If you've ever been judged before just know
that they're not really judging you. If you've ever judged before just know that you
have no idea what you're talking about. And we get a chance to then begin asking more
questions, hey what's on your mind? hey what are you feeling? Hey, can you tell me why
you did that, what made you do that? And we can begin learning more about each other
because I think our world has become a lot of point fingers and a lot less love and I
think we need a lot more love in the world. So that's my invitation to folks. Make a
mask. Love yourself, love each other, and take better care of each other. That's it.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Thank you Ashanti, here's to a lot more love. Yes. Alright. Thank you
everybody for listening to the show this week. This has been Lisa Petrides with
Educating to be Human. “If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple,
Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for
links and information on our guests. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and
Twitter at edutobehuman, that is e-d-u to be human. “This podcast was created by Lisa
Petrides and produced by Helene Theros. Educating to be Human is recorded by Nathan
Sherman and edited by Ty Mayer. (Transcribed by Sonix.ai - Remove this message by upgrading your Sonix account)
(Transcribed by Sonix.ai - Remove this message by upgrading your Sonix account) Welcome to Educating to Be Human, a podcastwhere we'll explore what it means to be human
in today's world at the intersection ofeducation, technology and culture.
I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of theInstitute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education.
Each week, I'll speak with people who aresupporting transformative change in
(00:29):
education today, that is, ordinary peoplecreating extraordinary impact.
Thank you very much for listening.
In this episode of Educating to Be Human, Ihave the pleasure of speaking with Ashante
(00:52):
branch. He's a former math teacher inOakland, California, and he's founder of the
Ever Forward Club.
Now Ashanti's classroom experience led himto see how the bright young men he taught
were not thriving, and he took it uponhimself to better understand how the
challenges in their personal lives kept themfrom making school a priority.
(01:15):
So, as founder of the Million Mask Movement,Ashanti leads a powerful initiative aimed at
helping young men, especially young men ofcolor, to better understand the metaphorical
masks they hide behind so as not tooutwardly express their fears and emotions.
So, through the development of an anonymousmask creation activity, which we'll hear more
(01:40):
about later, these young men are given thespace and the encouragement to express their
full selves, and in doing so, they're ableto better understand, share, and support
their struggles with others.
So in this episode, we talk about Ashanti'sjourney, the future of the Million Masks
(02:01):
Project, and the powerful impact of creatinga more authentic and supportive world for our
youth and for each other.
So let's go behind the mask.
Hi, Ashanti. Welcome!
I'd love to start today by asking you aboutwhat the Ever Forward Club is and a little
bit about your start as a teacher.
Yeah. Thank you.
(02:22):
You know, I was a first year teacher.
I had just left my engineering career, andmy vision was in life to be rich.
And when teaching called me, I ran from it.
And so the fact that I was finding myself,you know, day one in this classroom with
these students scared out of my mind, like,what's going to happen next?
I was clear that I was there for a reason.
(02:43):
I didn't know the only reason at the moment,I didn't know the reason at the moment, but I
deeply felt like there's a calling happeningin my life.
And so I began teaching at San Lorenzo HighSchool, and I saw, like, really smart young
men failing my class.
Like, I was like, wait a minute, you'resmart.
I can tell you're smart. I can see it inyou.
You're maybe trying to hide it from others,but I can tell, like in just the context and
(03:07):
how quickly you pick up on things like.
But school wasn't cool to a lot of studentswho I saw.
And I had kind of forgotten what it was liketo be a student who wanted to be cooler than
I wanted to be smart.
And I was like, what's going on here?
And it wasn't until I just decided thateither I'm leaving teaching because I'm
failing. I'm doing a horrible job.
(03:28):
If smart kids are failing my class and Ithink I'm smart, like, why are we creating
failures? So the vision was I was going toleave, but I was like trying one last thing.
I mean, I went back to school to do thisprofession that I thought was calling me, and
I'm doing bad at it. And I think otherteachers were like, well, you'll get good at
it. Just give it a couple of years.
I'm like, wait, you mean I got to be brokeand a failure for a couple of years?
(03:50):
I mean, I knew I was going to sign up to bebroke, you know, but I didn't sign up to be a
failure. And that's how it all started.
And so I invited them out to lunch.
I said, look, I'll buy you lunch once aweek.
In exchange for lunch,uring those lunchsessions, I want you to teach me how to be a
better teacher. Like, what am I doing wrong?
Like, let's let's let's learn about eachother.
But also I want you to figure out, help mefigure out how I can make school better for
(04:12):
you, because it doesn't make sense thatyou're not doing well.
Now, some of the students in our club, theyweren't all failing classes.
Some of them, just their social capital waschallenged.
So they were great academically, butsocially they were either in a shell or they
were like shot.
Like whatever it was, I just saw somethingamazing in those young men.
And so that's how it all started.
So that was 2004.
(04:33):
You know, this is our 20th year anniversary.
I'll fast forward you really far to 2015.
We were featured in a documentary called TheMask You Live In.
And the reason I'm fast forwarding there's alot more in between there, but just to name
it. What I didn't know in the beginning,when I started the documentary filmed us, was
that I was talking about the masks, youknow, back in 2004, but I just wasn't using
(04:54):
the metaphor of a mask.
I knew there was something going on withthose students that were like showing this
thing on the outside, but there was moregoing on on the inside.
And I think it took, you know, that first 11years to kind of like come to a place of
being able to explain it in a clean, clear,concise way of what I was seeing.
And that's how it all happened.
You came to Big Ideas Fest some years ago anddid this amazing session for us on taking off
(05:20):
the Mask, and I've since experienced it inother venues and know that you've been doing
this around the world.
And so maybe tell us a little bit morereally about the masks and what that what
that is. You just alluded to it, but tell uswhat it means to take off the mask and a
little bit about about what you do in that.
Yeah. So what I have been seeing over those11 years of what I was doing at Everforward,
(05:43):
let's say I saw smart young men not showinghow smart they were before, ever before it
started. I had forgotten that I used to dothat in middle school.
When I got to high school, I was already ontrack.
So when I'm teaching these students and I'mlike, dude, why are you, why are you, why
would you rather have a fight with me or anargument with me than just to let me support
you? I'm not your enemy.
(06:03):
Maybe you have enemies out here.
Maybe there's enemies in your community.
But I'm not one of them.
I want you to be your best.
And I think what I saw in them was, there'sa certain way I have to show up in life.
And I think the mask is like, you put onthis mask.
There's what the character is in that mask.
If you've ever been in a theater class,maybe they even practice with masks.
(06:23):
They say, hey, take this mask and act likethis character.
And you just you get to put on this persona.
It's what I want people to see about me.
It's what I let people see.
And when you think about Behind the mask,it's the things I don't let people see.
I don't talk about.
There's one mask that most people won't beable to see it, but I'm going to have you
describe it. So basically it's a circle witha smiley face.
And then there's four words on the front ofthe mask.
(06:46):
It says happy, smart, outgoing and caring.
That's what this young man This is from ayoung man.
Shows on the front of the mask is anonymous.
I don't know who it belongs to, but I willnever forget it.
When I first opened it up and I saw it.
And on the back of this mask, if you look,there's a bunch of words written in the same
(07:09):
word, written 18 times.
And that word is anger.
Anger. Yeah
Anger. And when I saw this, it not only,like, stopped me in my tracks, I literally
just stared at it for a long time andrealized how many of our young men are
walking around happy, smart, outgoing andcaring on the outside.
Yet what they're not talking about, whatthey're not showing, is that they're carrying
(07:32):
around a load of anger, or replace that wordwith any other emotion you can think of.
And I think that that is what I began to seehappening in schools.
I began to see also, what happens in schoolsis a context of like, if I am in a certain
school environment and let's say I go to theoffice and I tell the somebody in the office.
(07:55):
They say office people who are there doingtheir job, they're busy.
They're just navigating the day.
I come in and say, hey, I'm feeling sad,worried and stressed.
And they're like, well, maybe, you know,just don't worry so much.
Don't stress so much, don't think so muchand go back to class, right.
Because our schools are designed or theymay, like somebody in the office may say, you
know what, actually we have a counselor overhere.
(08:17):
Now, let's say you go see the counselor.
There's another scenario.
Oh, do you have insurance?
Go have your parents fill out this paperworkso then we can talk, because now there's a
there's a thing that's in the way of this.
And maybe I can't tell my parents because myparents don't believe in that.
So therefore, now I'm stuck.
So they need they need the permission fromtheir parents to to be able to talk to the
(08:37):
school counselor.
That's right. The rule that school has inplace.
But let's say because no one in the officeis there, let me just have a chat with you
and see how you're doing. I mean, if youtold me that if somebody told me that a
friend of mine told me, I'm like, hey,what's on your mind?
I would ask that question, but if you're ina school where you got hundreds of kids
running around and some kids comes in, ifyou're not careful, you can go through the
rigid process and miss the heart.
(08:58):
And let's say that same kid two days laterpunches some kid in PE because he talked
about him. He said something to them, didsomething to them.
That kid comes back to the office now.
That kid now has done an act that we knowwhat to do with schools, know what to do with
a kid who has physically assaulted anotherkid, because we have a rule book and it says:
you hit somebody, it can be this consequenceor this consequence or this consequence up to
(09:21):
a suspension for multiple days.
Now, the kid who came in two days agotelling you they was worried and stressed, we
had nothing for them necessarily when thatwas what it was.
But now that I've done something, now we gota consequence.
And the consequence is not getting yousupport about the worry and stress that you
were feeling already is to just deal withthe symptom of what you have now expressed on
(09:42):
the outside. And I think that what I saw inever forward with the mask was sometimes
young people don't even know how to ask forhelp when they're feeling stressed, worried
and sad. We have some work to do around thatsocial emotional development in young people.
And so that's why that's why we created themask activity.
It's anonymous. Right. It's like but if wecan get a litmus test to say, oh, this is
what's happening. There are students at thisschool who are walking around writing angry
(10:07):
18 times on the back of this idea of a mask.
We probably should talk about anger.
Anger. How do you how do you navigate anger?
How do you navigate stress?
How do you navigate sadness?
How do you when do schools teach thoseclasses?
It almost rarely ever happens.
Right, so tell me how this work of taking offthe mask was integrated?
Was it started actually within the EverForward club.
(10:29):
And then how has it evolved over time?
This work just seems so phenomenallyimportant to what we're seeing today, and
it's hard to believe that every schoolwouldn't want a program like this.
Yeah, I think that one of the things I saw isthat when we did the activity that first time
in the documentary, I didn't know it wasgoing to work.
(10:49):
I was working with a group of young men atFremont High School in Oakland who were
struggling, and I had tried all of my bestactivities with them.
You know, I had been doing ever forward, youknow, almost nine years by that time, ten
years. And I'm like, okay, let's do thisactivity and that activity and that.
And nothing was working with these youngmen.
I mean, they were resistant.
Anything that had to do with talking aboutfeelings was a barrier.
(11:11):
And I was like, what is going on?
Now I'm the dean that year, so I'm dealingwith students, when they get kicked out of
class, I'm dealing with them. When they'recutting class in the hallway, I'm dealing
with them when they're caught smoking overthere behind the gym.
I'm I'm dealing with all this stuff.
But they weren't talking about what theywere really going through.
And what I realized right away was my job asan educator was like, learn the deeper what
(11:32):
was happening. So when they asked me to be apart of this documentary, I said, look, these
young men in this club, they don't open up.
Like I began building a club there, but itwas not our official program.
It was a little it was a hybrid of what ournormal club was.
What I what I began to see when I askedthese young men to not talk about it, just to
write it. Don't put your name on it.
(11:53):
Anonymous. When we did that activity in thedocumentary, like when I'm in the room with
him, I'm literally waiting for an argumentto start because anytime we ask them about
how they feel, somebody is going to startdoing something to distract the room because
they had a fear or a barrier or some kind ofa built in rule system that said, don't talk
(12:14):
about feelings. And so they resisted.
And what I found was that when they whenthey took these pieces of paper and they
balled them up and they threw them at eachother, and when they opened up, they got a
new one and they opened it up.
It wasn't their paper, it was somebodyelse's in that room paper.
And they realized, oh, wow.
When they heard the words of the young menin that room hearing what's on the front and
(12:34):
what's on the back, they were like the roomdropped into a place I had never seen before.
And I think that is the opportunity.
And it was a clarity like, oh, okay, now Iwas in the room when it first happened, but
it wasn't almost until and I started makingmasks with people on a smaller scale.
(12:55):
But when I went to the documentary to see it,The Mask You Live In, and sat in that chair
and watched it, that's when I saw it, right?
Like I had been experiencing it.
But it was another thing when I was sittingin that chair and I'm literally like, I, I
cried in there because I saw things in theroom that I didn't see where I was sitting
from my vantage point, and I was like, oh mygoodness.
(13:18):
And I was clear at that point that this isexactly where we're going next.
The just the giving it a name, a metaphor,giving it a room.
Anonymous. Giving it space to talk about itand not having to like feel like the light is
on me. Made it so much easier for young mento be able to talk about it, and made it
(13:38):
easier for people to be able to say, ohyeah, I get that.
Oh man, I experienced that too.
And so that's the the tagline.
There's more to me than you can see.
You know, there's more to you than I can seeby looking at you.
And so when we can be, when we can hold thatcontext.
I think more people need to be aware of thatcontext, but hold that context.
I think we can do so much more.
(13:59):
You know.
I'd love to hear a little more about thisproject in action and its impact on the young
men you work with.
Yeah, I have seen this concept provide spaceand room for young men and all students
because now it's a global campaign.
I work originally began with just young men,but what I've seen it do is create space for
(14:24):
people to just get clear that it's not justme.
Now, that's easy to say.
You're not alone, right? That's a tagline.
It's a hashtag. It's t shirts.
It's. You're not alone, right?
It's all the things that you're not alonefits under in the world.
But there's a deeper place of, like, reallyseeing it, feeling it, hearing it,
understanding it. And I think what we see inthe work with the masks, like the first
(14:47):
workshop that we did when the movement beganto grow.
So when I started realizing that thisactivity was the activity that we were going
to, like, put out in the world, we gotinvited to a conference.
One of my team members, a young man who hasbeen a part of our work, we go to this hotel
in Burlingame.
We're getting ready for the workshop at 7:00in the morning, getting everything ready.
Hey, where are the masks?
(15:09):
Because in the documentary, I make copies ofthese masks.
So I have made copies of a bunch of thesemasks.
And we get to the hotel.
There's no mask.
Now, he and I had a longer talk, but I'lljust say right now he had two jobs.
Markers and masks.
Markers and masks.
And there's no mask.
I'm like how how are we going to do a maskworkshop with no masks?
(15:31):
And so in this moment, I'm like, I'll godown to the copy center.
I don't know if you've ever been to too manyhotels, copy centers.
Most times they're average at best.
This one had no copy machine that wasworking.
They said you can make two copies or fivecopies.
Whatever it was, it was not going to be 80that I needed.
And I'm like oh my God, there's no Kinko'splace, there's no print shop nearby.
(15:51):
And my brain is like, okay, we got invitedto do this workshop.
We're we're what are we going to do?
So that was the first day I went to thefront desk.
I said, do you have any paper?
Can I have some paper? That's how thedrawing started.
That's how the drawing started, becauseoriginally I had just in the documentary, I
printed masks. It was just a random maskonline.
I just printed it and then I was like, shesaid, well, we can't give you any of these
paper because we need it for these machines.
(16:13):
But I can give you this big paper.
I'm like, I'll take whatever you can give me.
So she gave me this 11 by 17 paper.
I have them still here somewhere.
This is this is 2014.
I think it was. I don't remember how whatyear, but 2014 around.
She hands me these big 11 by 17 pieces ofpaper and I'm like, we gotta work with it.
And literally I remember, you know, there'sa snowball fight happens after they ball
(16:33):
these pieces of paper. These were like snowglobes, people.
I said, listen, these are the biggest piecesof paper we've ever worked with.
So please don't don't hurt nobody.
Right. But it was like, that's the firsttime.
And when I went home that night and I openedall these pieces of paper up and I smashed
them down and I was like, this is amazing.
And that's when I knew that it wasn't goingto be any more of me ever printing masks.
(16:55):
It was going to be me giving people justpermission and the space to draw their own
mask. We're we're at about 80.
We have it's called the Million Mask Movie.
We have a long way to go. We're at about 80plus thousand right now, and it's been just a
amazing journey of watching what gets drawn.
So tell me about the Million Mask Movement.
(17:16):
So you have 80,000.
We're going to get to a million.
How's that going to happen? And what's goingto happen in our communities as we're doing
this?
Yeah. You know, now that I'm starting to seethat we're going to start telling the story
along the way. So we get this first researchpaper coming out.
We're going to ideally produce two moreresearch papers in the summer.
Really looking at the data that we'relearning.
This first one is about two sophomoreclasses at two different schools, a private
(17:40):
school and a public school.
And looking at those masks, the next onewill probably be about young men and you
know, I don't we haven't figured out theyoung men are going to help create the topic.
Like, who are we going to look at?
And then we're going to do probably one morethis summer.
So we're going to start telling some of thestories we're learning.
We've been sharing masks on social media,but I think even sharing masks, people aren't
(18:02):
they're not it's not as compelling as Ithought it would be, even though the images
are very compelling to me.
So we're really always we're constantly justtesting the water, like, what is what message
needs to be out there? And since most of ourwork is in education, we're going to start
sharing who's struggling in our schools.
We know that our young men, our boys arestruggling, and not that the only ones
struggling, but they are struggling.
(18:22):
And so we're going to start really kind oflike honing in on some of those, you know,
middle aged boys, middle school, highschool, and maybe start with a middle school
group, you know, 11 to 14 and then 14 and 18or those groups are like, what are we seeing?
What are they telling us? Because they'reputting compelling words on those cards.
And so that's the next step.
I was worried for a long time, like, why isit taking so long to get to a million?
(18:44):
Like, isn't this an amazing idea?
That's what people say about their ideas,right?
This is an amazing idea.
But I realized that okay, we're going to getthere eventually.
Right now, let's start telling the storiesof what we're learning.
And I didn't think about that in thebeginning because I wasn't creating it with
the end in mind. I was creating it for whatI was, what I was serving right here in the
present moment, you know?
(19:04):
Yeah. I think the story is about what you'relearning are are so important to understand
now because you're really trying to educatepeople, right?
Educators and other young people about howour young people in need, and our at risk
students, how they're trying to navigatethis world that they're experiencing.
Right. So you're trying to create this, thishuman conversation among people.
(19:26):
And it seems like when they're in thosegroups, that's when they're really having
that connection. Maybe it doesn't surpriseme as much as it's harder than you thought on
social media, although I don't know how muchyou've done with TikTok or something like
that, but certainly just posting a pictureof a mask is not the same experience of
actually, you know, being in a room andhaving this human connection and and taking
(19:47):
your mask and crumpling it in a little balland then having a snowball fight with them
across, you know, across a room, across aclassroom, across a ballroom, whatever it is.
So I can see how this next step really hasto be about telling, showing the data,
telling the stories.
What have you learned?
How are you going to do that differentlynow?
What are you thinking?
(20:08):
Yeah, well, one of the things I think aswe're in this next phase, as we're telling
more of the stories, is as we share masks,as we invite young people to be a part of it.
So we're building out our young men's core.
That's going to be starting this summer.
That'll be the first group that will gothrough this social Emotional Leadership
academy this summer.
They're part of their job is going to bethey'll be on 3 or 4 teams and one of the
(20:32):
teams. Their job is to figure out what do weneed to do, not only to encourage more young
people to participate, but what do we needto do to engage the communities in this tool?
So we're we're going to put it in the handsof youth.
Right. I've been using my old ideas, my oldideas for all this time.
(20:53):
And now it's like, okay, we need to get theyoung people involved.
One thing we're really excited about, we hadthree sets of our young men who went with us
to South by Southwest for this pop up thatwe had, we had our big booth.
It was a beautiful experience.
Those young men, their role was to be a partof this mental health action day, which was
last week. Four of them ignited pop ups attheir school events.
(21:17):
Actually five, five, five and one is stillin the process because he's going to do it
between now and the end of the year.
So it was an opportunity for them to like,take it and have the have the positive
experience or even the challengingexperience of what does it look like for me
to go out into the world to then deliverthis thing that I know about, I understand
it, how do I talk to other young people?
(21:37):
And I think through their experience ofthis, it is going to help them.
And they at South by Southwest, they wereamazing, but they were talking to a lot of
adults. I think it's sometimes easier foryoung people to talk to adults relatively,
than to talk to their own peers.
And so when they can find out the best wordsto encourage their peers to take this
anonymous tool.
Three steps, six words, it's easy to say noto this.
(22:01):
Why do you want me to do that? It's easy tosay no because if.
But how do you help them be able to find thewords to explain to their peers?
So then their peers gets the chance to be apart of what we grow out of it.
So I'm super excited.
I think that that's the next step is gettingthe young people involved.
But also as I'm as a, you know, a leader ofthis movement and trying to really raise the
(22:21):
funds for it and raise awareness about it.
You know. You just said a phrase a littlewhile back, and we haven't said it directly,
but this work is really about mentalwellness, right?
It's about mental health.
And I don't know that you started that way,but maybe it's just because now we have
social emotional learning as as words thatwe understand stand in our education systems.
(22:45):
I mean, that really seems to be the crux ofwhat you're talking about.
And yet there seems to still be a stigmaabout about mental health.
And maybe you could talk a little bit aboutthat so we understand that better.
Yeah. So this this topic is personal to me inlots of ways.
And I'll say the first way is personal to meis I have a brother who has paranoid
(23:06):
schizophrenia. We didn't know about itgrowing up.
He had ear infections.
He had he had tubes in his ears.
He had a lot of some health issues.
He was taking a lot of medicine growing up.
He had seizures.
And so he got he grew up, and he ended upgetting himself in trouble.
He ended up in jail for something kind ofsmall.
But then he began in jail.
(23:27):
He began to do all these ridiculousbehaviors in jail.
So he kept getting more time, like somethingthat should have been six months turned into
years and years and years.
And it was a behaviors that was happening inthere.
But he was in general population.
He wasn't tested. No one had tested him.
But my brother has a mental healthdisability.
And and it wasn't until they got him testedthat figured out he had schizophrenia.
(23:49):
Then. Then they moved him to the the rightplace, a place that the men's colony in
Atascadero. That's the place where folkswith mental illness usually get the support,
so they not only get the medicine they need,but they get the support they need while they
do whatever sentence they have.
And my brother should have been out of jailway longer before that, but he was never
diagnosed. I'm naming that context because.
(24:09):
So when I found out that it happened with mybrother, I was like, okay, well, how do we
get him the support he needs?
Right. And it's so it's hard.
It's hard work. It's hard work because hehas a mind of his own.
He's he's he's brilliant.
He's smart. But he also has this thesechallenges that come up from time to time.
And you never know when they're going toshow up.
Right. And so that's the one way it'spersonal.
(24:29):
And I'll say the second way is personal ismy godson.
They just found my godson in Los Angeles.
He he was unresponsive and he died.
And my godson had bipolar disorder and hewas going through it.
He was young.
I want to say he probably was in his early20s, 24, maybe 25.
(24:51):
And I think that here's what I know is thata person who cares about my brother so much,
and watching how the system continues to notbe of service to him, I don't have those
skills to help my brother with the ways thathe needs help, and the system is designed to
just kind of like, get you out of theiroffice.
(25:12):
All these programs and systems and I say allof them, they're going to name all of them.
And the ones that my brother has foundhimself a part of are looking for fast
answers, quick answers. And then when thosedon't work, when the person has a little bit
of consciousness, I don't want to be, Idon't want to medicate myself.
I don't want to. Then there's like, there'sno answers.
And I think what I know with young people isthat growing up, we didn't talk about mental
(25:34):
health issues. Growing up, there was notherapists.
I don't even know when I first heard thatword.
I definitely wasn't a teenager.
I didn't even know what that meant?
There were students who were in a certainset of classes that had classes, but no one
talked to us about what was happening inthat class.
Most times, people got made fun of becauseof certain exterior behaviors that no one
(25:55):
helped educate us on.
Oh yeah, be nice. Don't make fun of them.
But not contextually.
Like, hey, this is what you should learnabout these things.
And I think this is a lack of educationaround it.
And I think that now that we're having moreconversation, you know, Mental Health Action
Day last week that we participated in wasthis beautiful concept of like, how do we go
from a concept of mental health awareness?
(26:16):
Oh, there's this thing called mental healththing and we should get help around it.
Well, how?
Well, if you and your family doesn't believein it, then where do you get the support?
If your family's not going to sign thisdocument that your school needs in order for
you to see a counselor at your school andyou know they won't sign it so you don't even
take it to them, then what do you do?
(26:37):
You just hold on to the stuff by yourselfand maybe you hold on to you get 18 or get to
college and then you can finally get somehelp.
I have met so many young men who bottledstuff up, even with me, and then I find out
later, I'm like, man, why didn't you saysomething?
And I think there's a deep fear if you ifyou know your family won't accept it.
So you don't tell them, and then you havethis mentor and then you're like, well, I
(27:01):
don't want you to think differently of me.
And so therefore I just don't say anything.
And it's like, how can you prove to somebodythat you won't think differently of them?
How can you, if they're worried aboutchanging how you see them, you see the
brilliance in them, you see the amazingnessin them.
Then it becomes really challenging for youngpeople who want the support and yet don't
(27:23):
know where to go. Because everywhere theygo, there's this, there's the roadblocks and
barriers. And so one of my young men justrecently told me that he had been having some
of these ideations, and I was like, how longhas this been going on?
He's like, for two years.
I'm like, oh man, thank you for sharing thiswith me, I said, and my my heart was like,
(27:45):
right there with him, like, man.
And also my heart was like, what did I notdo well enough to earn your trust before?
I'm so glad that you're still here.
I'm glad you finally came to me.
But what did I need to have done better?
What did I need to have said better?
What do I know?
Those are all my own things that I'm workingthrough.
But I always told him. I said, listen, I'mhere for you.
(28:06):
And I'm so glad you shared it with me.
Now our job is to do the hard work.
Now you've now let it go.
You're not carrying it by yourself anymore.
Now, how do we begin finding the support?
And sometimes that part is even hard.
And so I think that with mental health, whatwe have to do as mentors, as educators, as is
say, okay, I don't want to make this worsefor you, but sometimes things are going to
have to get a little bit messier before theycan get cleaner.
(28:28):
And so what is, you know, how do we moveforward?
What is the next opportunity here?
I mean, I'm I'm thinking about what you'vejust been talking about.
It's very it's very deep and it's the cruxof so much that is that we're seeing go go
south in our in our schools, in our societytoday.
So what is the opportunity here?
(28:48):
I mean, something like the Million Masksmovement, you know.
Yeah. It sounds nice.
Million masks movement.
Right. It's a it's a great catch phrase.
It means a lot. But I think it also could bephenomenal if we really had that kind of
understanding. And here in public education,at least in the US, we have such an
opportunity to start something like that tomake it happen.
(29:11):
Why isn't this the first thing that happenswhen you walk in the door of that school, as
opposed to what happens when you're about toget kicked out?
Yeah, thank you for that.
What we have to do with schools andeducation is we have to have quality
professional development.
Now, as a teacher for ten years, as anadministrator for three, I can name to you
(29:33):
maybe five professional developments.
I remember in those ten years of teachingand three of them because of how bad they
were. What industry?
Looks like it did 100 years ago.
And yet we would be shocked that it doesn'twork.
Schools. School.
100 years ago.
Two rows of desks.
The board in the front. Maybe there's whiteboard now.
Not chalk anymore.
Maybe there's a whiteboard and an electronicboard.
(29:55):
But it's the same. I'm gonna tell you someinformation.
In two weeks later, you tell it back to me.
I'm gonna grade you based on how well yourepeated it back to me.
And then we're gonna do the cycle all overagain, right?
Like the similar cycle over and over again.
Maybe you got a table instead of desk.
Like all these ways of, like, small littlechanges of how we have to transform our
schools. I believe that professionaldevelopment is going to be a key one.
(30:17):
And I think helping educators recognize thatyou're teaching more than a subject.
Like I went in to be a math teacher.
I was not there to start a club for youngmen who were failing math.
I was going to teach math and most teachers I heard were saying well, hey I taught it,
they didn't do the work. That's on them. And I was like, huh. I couldn't hold that
context, I didn't believe in that theory process. The one time I told students, hey,
if you don't want to do any work. Go sit in the back. And I'll teach the ones in front
who I want to teach. I said it once. I said it. After I said, and you better be back
there doing work. Because in my mind that's not a realistic solution. You mean you're
going to let him. He's not wanting to do work and you're going to just give him
permission not to do work? No, not in this class. In this class, I'm going to move you
to the front. I'm going to have you walk around with me the whole day. So I can be
on, witnessing you. All these ways that I saw schools, I think that schools need more
of that. The Million Mask Movement, it's an opportunity for schools, like you said, the
beginning of school, to say here is what is happening in this building. Of these
thousands students, five hundred students, this is what they're saying what is
happening that we can't see. Now, we can begin over this school year, to say look,
we've got 24 percent of our students talking about sadness or fear, we have 30 percent
kids saying anxiety and stress. What can we be doing weekly on posters around the
schools, on announcements in the mornings, on Friday fun days. We're gonna talk about
stress management. We're gonna learn how not to be just students of academics, we're
going to learn how to be students of human development and self worth. Because if we
don't add those things into schools we're going to continue doing what we do. We're
going to see the kids who are going to get their education, get their education. I have
plenty of kids when I was a teacher who they didn't need me. The other students. I can
deliver their homework to their house in a manila folder with a pencil. And they're not
doing no work. So imagine in the same room, same schools, same class, I'll have a
student who will make up his own work if I didn't give him any. And one that no matter
if it's delivered to them in their room, in the quiet of the evening, they're not gonna
do it. If you're a teacher and you have teach that range of students, good luck that
you're only going to teach math. You have to teach with the understanding that this world
matters more, that you matter more than the grade on the paper, but that you can do it
if you work hard. And that's the work that matters. So i think it starts with
professional development and too many schools don't do professional development.
Teachers have to go to a professional development meeting because it's in their
contract but does it have to be quality? Most teachers are at the back of the room
grading papers and somewhere in the back folding their arms and saying what the heck
is this about. And I've seen it all. And I'm clear that if we don't improve that part of
our schools, we are going to continue to think that it's gonna get better because
we're hiring poor, or we didn't you know give out any prizes during some holiday. I
think we have to help teachers become better in that way. Speaker 2: I love that. I'm
going to envision for you the first day of school where all the students come in and
the first thing they do is they do a take off the mask project. In this school, that's
the assembly. Maybe the teachers have done it in their pd, in their professional
development, before school started that year. By the way, that's how we get to a
million masks and that's how we get into, as you said, into this education system that
actually shows us what it means to be human and how we can do that and how we can create
that. Ashanti, is there anything else you want to offer or tell us or express before
we end this podcast today? Ashanti (30:28):
Yeah, I was just saying two things. The mask
movement is available to anyone around the world. You can make a mask at
millionmask.org. Millionmask.org. And it's anonymous so we invite you to make a
mistake, we invite you to share with someone. This summer we are building out a
new model so that teachers can use it and have some immediate data that pulls back to
them right away. So when you make those masks with your students, you're going to
get the data right in the minute so that you'll be like. Wow, this is happening. So
that's happening. And the second thing I will say to people is that there's a
quote we use in our work that says this, that says the longest distance that most
people travel is the 18 inches between their head and their heart. And our work is not
trying to fill people's head with more information. It's to say can you take the
journey from your head to your heart and can you realize that there's so much more to you
that anybody can see by looking at you. If you've ever been judged before just know
that they're not really judging you. If you've ever judged before just know that you
have no idea what you're talking about. And we get a chance to then begin asking more
questions, hey what's on your mind? hey what are you feeling? Hey, can you tell me why
you did that, what made you do that? And we can begin learning more about each other
because I think our world has become a lot of point fingers and a lot less love and I
think we need a lot more love in the world. So that's my invitation to folks. Make a
mask. Love yourself, love each other, and take better care of each other. That's it.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Thank you Ashanti, here's to a lot more love. Yes. Alright. Thank you
everybody for listening to the show this week. This has been Lisa Petrides with
Educating to be Human. “If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple,
Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for
links and information on our guests. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and
Twitter at edutobehuman, that is e-d-u to be human. “This podcast was created by Lisa
Petrides and produced by Helene Theros. Educating to be Human is recorded by Nathan
Sherman and edited by Ty Mayer. (Transcribed by Sonix.ai - Remove this message by upgrading your Sonix account)
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