The National SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity)SM partners with schools, organizations, and communities to develop leaders who guide their peers in conversational communities to drive personal, organizational, and societal change toward social justice.
Participants first attend SEED New Leaders Week, where our immersive train-the-trainer model takes them through an intensive process from which they will experience methods and pedagogy that will enable them, with the support of their administration, to develop a series of seminars for colleagues at schools, organizations, workplaces, or communities where they are employees or members.
SEED leaders design their SEED seminars with the flexibility to adapt them to their own local needs. They include personal reflection and testimony, listening to others' voices, and learning experientially and collectively, in the context of each participant’s intersecting identities. Through this methodology, SEED equips participants to connect our lives to one another and to society at large by acknowledging systems of power, oppression, and privilege.
More than 2,900 educators, parents, and community leaders from 42 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, plus 15 other countries, have been trained as SEED leaders by the National SEED Project and its Minnesota and New Jersey branches.
A Brief History
In 1987, Peggy McIntosh, author of the classic paper, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” founded the National SEED Project to confirm her belief that teachers could be leaders of their own professional development. She and Emily Style, author of the 1988 article “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” co-directed the project for its first 25 years. Brenda Flyswithhawks, whose consulting was a shaping force from the beginning, also served as a co-director for 15 years from 2002-2016. The scholarly activism of SEED, which has always been housed at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, seeks to balance, in the words of Emily Style, “scholarship on the shelves” with “scholarship in the selves." Now in its fourth decade, SEED is currently led by Co-directors Emmy Howe, Gail Cruise-Roberson, and Jondou Chase Chen, with Associate Directors Motoko Maegawa and Ruth Mendoza.
What SEED Offers
SEED offers:
- A seven-day, residential New Leaders Week that prepares people to lead SEED seminars in institutions or communities where they are already employees or members
- A three-day, residential ReSEED training that helps experienced SEED leaders to revisit, renew, and recharge their practice
- An online community for SEED leaders to support each other, network, and share resources
- Regional events that showcase SEED concepts and methods
- Workshops at conferences around the U.S.
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SEED leaders get:
- Facilitation techniques and interactive exercises that increase people's abilities to see systemically
- Access to SEED leaders-only resources and online community
- Print and digital media resources for adults and youth
- Regional networks for SEED leaders
- Support from SEED co-directors and other experienced SEED leaders
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Learn more about becoming a SEED leader.
What Makes SEED Different?
- SEED believes that each of us is an authority on our own experiences and that cultivating spaces for self-learning and peer-sharing leads to meaningful conversations and change toward equity and diversity.
- SEED acknowledges each participant’s intersecting identities and the ways these multiple identities are both personal (our own) and political (socially shaped).
- SEED asks us to reflect on and share our own stories of identities and wellness and to consider how they are connected to others, as a necessary prelude to creating more inclusive learning spaces and communities.
- SEED takes a systemic approach to oppression and privilege, rather than seeing them only in terms of individuals making individual choices.
- SEED acknowledges that justice work is an ongoing process, professionally and personally, not a one-time training.
- SEED honors and develops local leaders rather than bringing in outside “experts” to lecture. SEED leaders guide their colleagues in experiential, interactive exercises and conversations often stimulated by videos and readings.
- SEED uses methods of intentionally structured group conversation, developed over more than 30 years, to create effective learning environments that include input from all voices.
- SEED work is not about blame, shame, or guilt about one's location in societal systems. It is about deepening awareness of and our sense of responsibility for the existence of these systems.
- SEED builds agency and capacity for change by asking what the justice is that we need individually, relationally, and systemically, and by committing to enact that change from our positions within our SEED sites.SEED is deeply grounded in recognizing the time it takes to self-reflect, to be in authentic conversation, and to design systemic change for justice. SEED seminars put in place an ongoing constructive conversation about sometimes polarizing issues. SEED is therefore not a quick fix for a crisis, but makes communities more competent to deal with crises when they do occur.
- SEED’s storytelling approach can complement other diversity programs by preparing participants to be more aware of their own experiences with privilege and oppression and to listen more effectively to the experiences of others.
