CATDC Women + Leadership Conference

The keynote speaker was Shabana Basij-Rasikh, founder of The School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA). She shared her journey growing up, attending school, and running a boarding school under now two Taliban regimes. She describes the risks her parents made to allow all their children to receive an education, the role of mentors, and now her own courageous efforts to run SOLA in Rwanda for refugee girls and their families. The mix of personal stories and her powerful examination of the importance of educating girls and women made for an incredibly inspiring and moving talk. My hope is to somehow bring her story to our community (she's done a TEDTalk and will soon be featured in 60 minutes) and share it with our students. The panel afters on leadership journeys was also useful in prompting me to think about a few things: Dr. Ashlee Gutierrez of BATTI spoke of resources for teachers around supporting BIPOC students in their classrooms (which I'm going to look into), and Catherine Hunter of RG175 spoke of asking ourselves how much challenge vs success do we want to achieve in our work. Thinking of this as a ratio and acknowledging what our current individual ratio is for how much we're willing to tolerate failure when challenging ourselves vs how much we need to feel successful in order to continue our work made me think about this as a possible useful framework for advising and supporting our students. Overall, I found it helpful to step away for a day and think about some larger issues around professional growth, networking and support, drawing boundaries, and how I prioritize or deprioritize certain things in my personal and professional life. But the highlight again was definitely getting to know the incredible work of SOLA and Shabana.