Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusivity

Guiding Antiracist Journeys

According to the Philadelphia Children's Movement website, PCM is a collective of families and educators talking, playing, learning, and rising up for racial justice. PCM envisions a world in which all people are liberated, whole, and valued. In working for this more just world, PCM organizes with families and schools to identify and subvert racism in both relationships and systems.

Since their founding in 2015, the Philly Children’s Movement (PCM) has worked collaboratively with many educators, parents/guardians, and organizations, facilitating professional development, building curricula, curating discussions, and supporting student-led actions. They've organized with students, stretched educators, and supported parents on their antiracist journeys.

PCM has core members and other skilled facilitators and organizers who serve as guides, digging into biases, identifying White supremacy and anti-Blackness, and working on shifts that bring about genuine and meaningful change. Learn more here.

PCM does not offer a band-aid. Over many months, they skillfully led faculty and staff through a series of discussions and workshops about racial awareness and implicit bias.

Coming soon!

View the Full Summary and Report here. 

2021 Summary Report.

2021 Listening Campaign Report: The Administration Team spent time at its Spring retreat reviewing the data, identifying actions we can take that are aligned with areas of growth and recommendations as we move forward. The report was then shared with Trustees and Faculty/Staff for feedback and processing.

Prior to receiving the PCM report, MPFS had already begun important JEDI work including:

• Trustee engagement consistently bringing a JEDI lens to meetings and discussions, and working towards having a JEDI line item in the yearly budget.
• Continue to list job openings on a more diverse array of job boards, intentionally working to build a more diverse faculty/staff as positions open up.
• Professional development funding has increased thanks to grants and donations. By June, half of our staff, including administration, will have attended either The Race Institute or Lion Story. The goal is to have everyone participate in an institute by the end of next year as a requirement.
• Additionally, we have been able to provide programming to our full community: Virtually Free film screening and panel discussion, City Love concerts for kids and families, and Dr. Sonja Cherry Paul’s work with our faculty and families.
• Middle School Racial Affinity Groups
• Include JEDI goals (see below) and expectations in Letters of Agreement, Staff and Family Handbooks

From the PCM Report, the task force has marked the below items as top priorities:

• Racial literacy, as with any type of literacy, requires the building and maintaining of a skills set. To that end, we will consistently incorporate professional development to build faculty and staff expertise and comfort level with more fluid JEDI concepts. 
• Develop affinity groups for families,  
• Revisit PCM for a Listening Campaign updated assessment in two years to help track our progress,
• Draft JEDI Goals- currently a work in progress with a small group of our JEDI Task Force

Our JEDI Keepers group was established following discussions by the Board's JEDI working group, which met from the fall of 2022 through the spring of 2023.

The working group recognized the vital need to integrate justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion principles into the fabric of every Board committee. However, as the Board continues to grow in its JEDI mindset, it was deemed essential to create a dedicated forum—the JEDI Keepers—to discuss challenges and develop new, creative initiatives.

The JEDI Keepers includes representatives from each Board committee. Staff members are also a key part of our group, and we focus on providing trustee support for Media-Providence Friends School’s JEDI initiatives, as requested by staff.

We believe that JEDI work is holistic, engaging both the heart and the mind, and that true progress begins with new understanding within ourselves. To honor this, we regularly dedicate time during our meetings to share our own perspectives and experiences related to JEDI principles.

In the Spring of 2020 we knew it was important to share more explicitly how we incorporate  our Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity (JEDI) work into our program, across all subjects and throughout the year. Hence the birth of the MPFS JEDI Task Force, made up of teachers, families, administration, and trustees. Teachers have incorporated social justice in a wide variety of ways over many years, and not just in January and February. Social Justice is wide reaching across subjects, and is honored throughout the curriculum all year long. This year we are committed to being more intentional about communicating and sharing our JEDI work with our community, as well as bringing more professional development and family events centered around JEDI topics and engagement. Some of these included:

• 2020-21:The MPFS Listening Campaign, facilitated by the Philly Children’s Movement
• The Race Institute (faculty) with Toni Graves Williamson and Ali Michaels
• February 4 - February 11, 2021: Access to the film Virtually Free by Andre Robert Lee
• February 9, 2021: Q&A sessions with Andre Robert Lee for our middle school students (2pm) and our families (7pm) 
• April 7, 2021: Sonja Cherry Paul joins our faculty meeting after school and presents to families that same evening.

This is a year of intentional purpose and more realistically, years of purpose in the pursuit of growing our racial literacy and positive racial identities, for our students, faculty, and families. Diversity is our super power, and as Katherine W. Phillps (Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and ethics and senior vice dean at Columbia Business School) writes in her 2014 (republished in 2020) for Scientific American, “Diversity enhances creativity.  It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, learning to better decision making and problem solving.”

During a difficult year that has, more than ever, brought the importance of this work to the forefront, MPFS pledges to be an example to our community that racial literacy and teaching social justice issues are not simply one-off lessons to be completed each year. In the same way that Friends education infuses the SPICES across subjects, our work with JEDI is a journey of learning and discovery that must be fostered throughout the curriculum.

MPFS families interested in joining the JEDI Task Force may do so by completing the form here. For any questions about JEDI, or any other aspect of our programming, please contact Director of Admissions & Programming, Angela DiMaria.

Coming soon...