Kaufman Updates
Permanent link for Area High School Groups: You are Invited!!! | By Zahabia Ahmed-Usmani, Youth Program Manager on October 15, 2024
Why do we travel? Even traveling two hours away to escape to a neighboring city can get us out of the mundane, awaken our senses, heightens our emotions, invigorate our mind and open us up to the possibility of something new. For students, field trips serve this purpose, to unfurl our horizons.
A field trip to the Kaufman Interfaith Institute will take your students out of the humdrum of the daily school environment. Kaufman’s home, located on GVSU’s downtown Health Science Campus, is just far away enough, just academic enough, just curated enough to transport students into a headspace where they feel safe and ready to lean into deep learning about themselves and others. Our welcoming staff work hard to create an environment that caters to the needs of teens to create safety and comfort.
Jenison High School students recently visited the Kaufman Interfaith Institute. Twenty freshman and sophomore students signed up to voluntarily spend the day building interfaith understanding and belonging with us. Kaufman is grateful to have a space that is malleable and effective for groups up to forty people. With a group size of twenty students we were able to provide soft seating in an intimate circle for our presentation portion and still have plenty of space for hands-on activities in the room.
Our short two hours together covered a lot of ground! Beyond sharing the important history of Kaufman’s founding and the critical nature of our work during these polarized times, we talked about our youth programming and the importance of youth leadership. The crux of our time together was spent exploring individual identity because knowing oneself is crucial to knowing the other. Then we explored the idea of cultural humility, how it’s defined and why it’s an important posture as we engage in the world.
While learning via presentations is interesting, embodied hands-on learning engages different pathways in the brain. In our first activity we engaged with our values. It allowed for students to discuss their understanding of different values, what those values mean to them, why they are important and how they impact their decision making. In our second activity we used Play-Doh to model our “Ideal Communities.” The discussion afterwards centered on topics of leadership, collaboration, resources, barriers, and profound direct connections to issues in their school community. Just as students were digging into the way in which they, as leaders, could impact their school it was time to leave. The Jenison group was able to continue their conversation back at school and debrief their time with us. The overwhelming feedback was that they wanted more time together and felt empowered by the importance of their role as leaders on campus to build belonging. They want to stay connected with Kaufman via the Scholars and with staff because of the connections we built in our short time together. They were honored to be treated with dignity and respect as young adults and not children in our space.
As Kaufman grows its youth programming we are learning from these experiences. We often do trainings for community organizations and internal departments at GVSU. We are learning that we can be a resource to schools who are looking for a field trip experience on a variety of topics related to interfaith understanding, identity, youth leadership and belonging (to name a few). We encourage you to reach out to Zahabia Ahmed-Usmani if you would like to plan a visit!
