This fall I am excited to convene a truly remarkable community of teachers and students, some of them founders and former directors of the Hart Leadership Program (HLP), others teaching and learning in it for the first time, and still others who may have just heard of the HLP. I urge you to peruse our current course offerings and also to visit the story quilt, a moving set of testimonials by former students that explain in powerful ways what a purposeful life looks and feels like. I also encourage you to pay attention to our events board where we highlight upcoming opportunities for students within Hart classes and across Durham County to listen, engage, and learn from one another.
We have three events that we are sponsoring and/or organizing this fall, each of them part of a revived “Connect to Politics” initiative. On September 21st , HLP co-sponsored with POLIS a visit from Kathy Tran. Tran is a 2000 Duke history graduate and alum of the SOL program. Tran came to the United States as a child refugee from Vietnam, and is the first Asian American woman elected to Virginia’s House of Delegates.
The second event focuses on the recent history and importance of student voting and the deliberate ways students have been discouraged or outright disfranchised from voting since 2008, when North Carolina produced the biggest youth voting wave of any state in the nation. On Thursday, October 25th, we will feature Parkland student, Sari Kauffman, whose response to the tragic shooting of her peers at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has been to register thousands of student voters while mobilizing many more to do the important work of getting citizens to vote in dozens of counties across Florida. Sari will be joined onstage by Anita Earls, a civil rights attorney who has litigated gerrymandering and defended voting rights across the South, and Symonne Singleton, a 2017 Duke grad who was disenfranchised in the 2014 midterm elections. On Friday, October 26th, Sari and Symonne will speak at North Caroline Central University.
Finally, on November 29th, we will convene a public conversation about “Dreamers,” focusing on the experiences and leadership that young undocumented men and women have generated across political, generational, and cultural divides. In all three convenings, we hold up the theme of Youth Leadership, reflecting on what the “fierce urgency of now” looks like for an extraordinary group of young men and women in North America, and what it means for the larger political and cultural life of the United States in the fall of 2018.
Stay tuned for more exciting events to come, including the rollout of a new SOL class sequence that I will be convening in the spring, summer and fall of 2019. Informational meetings for SOL will commence at the end of September by HLP Program Coordinator Maria Pacheco.
I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you at our fall events,
Gunther Peck
Director, The Hart Leadership Program