MEET ROSE FROM CONCRETE

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MEET ROSE FROM CONCRETE

rfc

A Q&A with our partners at Rose from Concrete, a youth led organization working to support students in their community through mutual aid, direct advocacy, and youth mentorship.

It’s because of community members like you that we are able to join our partners in the fight for an equitable education for students. Connect with us to receive regular updates that empower you to make a meaningful impact on the lives of students and contribute to a more just and equitable education system!


what inspired you to form this organization?

Kayla Williams:

We at Rose from Concrete have grown to understand love as the will to extend yourself for either your own or another person’s growth. Thank you bell hooks. And we’ve got examples of love and what it looks like in action, right? Because we believe that love is action it’s not just words or feelings. And so I say that I love myself, I love my community, I love my people.

And I’m frustrated by the conditions that we are often expected to live in, in complacency. But how could I be complacent? How could I not be, you know, angered, fearful, upset, by, you know, the scarcity, the violence that we’re, you know, expected to live under? So, yeah,

I’m motivated by love to play my role in creating community or co-creating a world that reflects the needs and desires of my community.

Shanniah Wright:

There’s a long list of reasons that I was able to co-found Rose from Concrete. The main one, I think, is because I come from a single parent household. My mom raised both me and my brother by herself, and I had to watch her every day, not even knowing that sometimes think about how she was going to feed us, how she was going to pay rent and just ultimately watching the system in general fail her.

She was able to put me in a position where I can think critically about the issues and problems that go on around me, which allowed me to co-create and co-found Rose from Concrete. But I know that every single day that there are other single mothers, there are other community members or just people in general that the system is consistently failing.

I think that people should not have to choose between happiness and survival. I think that survival should be the bare minimum and that everyone should be able to choose to do what they want to do without the pressures of whether they were going to eat, sleep or breathe weighing down on them.

Osariemen Aiyevbomwan:

What pushed me to start this work is that I come from a big Nigerian-American household, and so for many of my siblings and myself included, being black and marginalized has really disrupted our connections to safety in our homes and in the world at large. And the violence inflicted

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on us has corrupted our intimate relationships with ourselves, but also with one another and each other. And because of these struggles, we’ve been alienated from our home, whether it be an unconscious or conscious effort.

And I’m of the mind that we all belong here, that we all have a right to feel safe and free during our time here on this earth. And so,

I want to restore the relationships with ourselves in our environment so that our descendants inherit a more free world.

I believe that we are redeemable and that justice is possible through coordinated action to get us free. And for me, RFC has presented the opportunity to do just that and also feel at home while doing it.

where did the name “rose from concret” come from and how is it reflected in the work you all do?

Shanniah Wright:

Rose from the concrete is a play on word rose as in the verb and the noun, the rose as a flower rose, as in the act of rising. And this is a really cool play on word because we use concrete as talking about the jungle that is New York, the concrete that we walked every single day that we grow up in roses sprouting from it and actually rising from our circumstances.

I love our name just because it allows us to create and nurture and play on those words of growth and growing and something beautiful, which are flowers and concrete being something rough. And as a big Tupac fan Rose that grew from the concrete. I think we embody that and we want other people to see themselves in that beautiful lens as a rose as something to be nurtured and grown. And that can grow in the most unexpected places.

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WHAT ARE SOME COMMON CHALLENGES YOUR STUDENTS FACE?

Kayla Williams:

I would say that students face very a multifaceted set of challenges. I think I kind of think of them or characterize them in three ways. First, I think there are material and basic physiological needs, right? We live in a society that allows scarcity to exist in abundance, which means that families deal with things like poverty, housing insecurity, food in access, that sort of thing.

And so children, you know, they belong to families, they are part of families. And they don’t simply shed that when they walk into the school door. So, you know, children, many of them are coming to school with these material needs still existing. And then, of course, they’re dealing with, I think the attack on education that we’re seeing. But that has been going on for, you know, frankly, forever.

Right. Are we ever really learning the truth I think an empowering truth in our schools, that’s up for debate. And then I think there is the socio-emotional, you know, challenges that come with being a young person, feeling powerless in a society that is telling you what you should look like, what you should be like, constantly reminding you how you, you know, pale in comparison to that.

HOW DO YOU REASSURE AND AFFIRM STUDENT IN TIMES OF ANXIETY AND UNCERTAINTY?

Osariemen Aiyevbomwan:

When I was in school feeling the pressure to remain OK, and also remain a good student, but also navigating a school environment that was very frustrating and dismissive of my experiences I leaned on the experiences of those who came before me. So mentorship really carried me through my school experience. And that is why RFC prioritizes peer mentorship and community as a protective factor in the lives of young students. When feeling anxiety it’s something that I do to reassure the youth in my community is letting them know that they have resources and they have people who look like them, who can relate to their experiences and keep them grounded in the power of love and in the power of community. So that is something that has also reassured me.

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OUTSIDE OF MENTORSHIP, WHAT OTHER RESOURCES DOES RFC PROVIDE?

Kayla Williams:

I would say that we aim to respond to the three buckets of needs that we identified. So material needs we aim to address through our mutual aid efforts. So aiming to have resources and funds pooled together so that if, you know, emergent needs do arise for youth, that we are able to offer them, you know, tangible support or connect them to someone who can do that.

Because once again, how can you prioritize the academic or the emotional if you know, you have more dire needs in front of you? We also offer, you know, like academic training and curriculum. So tutoring. Shaquille recently started a robotics program, you know, like to give tangible academic skills and support. And then finally we aim at the socio-emotional through our curricula on love and through our mentorship program.

I would definitely recommend that people just start to have conversations. I think, like I said before, one of the most powerful tools

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of opposition is to convince folks that they are alone, that you are an individual against capitalism, you are an individual against white supremacy, you are an individual against misogyny. And so you feel like in response to that, I need to, you know, pick myself up by the bootstraps instead of coming together as a collective right, as a team, as a group, you know, as is done, you know, across sectors, right?

Usually creating progress in the direction that we don’t want. People aren’t doing that as individuals. They’re doing that, you know, with the help of decades of systems and policies and groups and people. And, you know, so I think talk to people around you recognize that you’re not alone in your beliefs and your desires, what you want to see in the world. And once you start to realize, wait you want the world to look like this, you want it to look like this too, you do too. Why doesn’t it? Right.

Collectively, we have power, we have voting power, we have spending power, we have political power. So, you know, why doesn’t the world look how we want it to look?

wHAT ARE SOME STARTING pOINTS FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GET INVOLVED?

Osariemen Aiyevbomwan:

Some starting points for parents and for the folks who are looking to be more and more involved in their community would definitely be to start small. I’ll start looking right. We are under the misguided impression that we need to go elsewhere and abroad to find something good. But I would say talk to your neighbor for an extra ten to 15 minutes.

Share your struggles, problem solve together. You don’t know what nuggets of wisdom these conversations may unlock within us just by virtue of our continued existence here in these environments, we all have access to so much knowledge and expert or problem solving skills that deserve to be shared and used to generate community solutions.

So form little groups and little gathering spaces and be intention in fostering those intimate connections. You never know what love and magic comes out of those efforts.

Kayla Williams:

Folks can support funds. Like I said before, we want to be able to respond to immediate needs, physiological needs, basic needs through resources and funds that we pull together so folks can contribute to that. And I think we need support as well as an organization, marketing support, communications, volunteering you know, media, really anything and everything we could really support on.

And I would say, yeah, it’s a mutual aid organization and so we aim to bring our time, our resources, our efforts, our knowledge together and to collectively drive change with that so you can fit in that wherever you know, feels right to you. But I would also say that you can do things in your own community too closer to you, with your people, your family, your friends, your you know, I think that is a larger vision that we’re working together for that has, I think, space in your city, in your home.

It doesn’t have to be in Brooklyn where we are, though that would be nice. We believe that love is a force that can through it all, despite the concrete, grow roses, create futures that we’re told are impossible ones of life and, you know, nourishment and fruit. So, yeah, we believe that we can do the impossible collectively, and through love at Rose from Concrete.

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