The program structure is robust, featuring bi-weekly, 90-minute sessions that allow students to engage deeply with the curriculum and develop their skills through direct interaction with their mentors. Complementing these sessions are field trips to leading STEM companies and guest sessions by professionals from major corporations such as Google and Amazon, which will provide real-world context and further learning opportunities. The project’s culmination is a Youth in STEM Panel event, enabling students to showcase their projects and network with industry leaders and peers. Rainbow Labs designed this event to affirm and strengthen community connections, enhancing the participants’ confidence and encouraging them to envision a future where they are active, recognized contributors to the STEM fields. Through this project, Rainbow Labs seeks to inspire and equip the next generation of LGBTQ+ STEM professionals, ensuring they receive the support, resources, and recognition they deserve.
]]>The Youth Co-op Connection project focuses on cooperative education, in practice, necessitates active learning, self-directed inquiry, and hands-on experience. It promotes learning that is relevant and connected to the lives of young individuals, nurturing their ability to question, analyze, and challenge the status quo, in collective action. This project centers underserved Black youth and will offer a nuanced and comprehensive open source curriculum for cooperative education, catered to middle school age youth. The curriculum design will be adaptable and applicable across diverse education settings, including public schools, youth entrepreneurship programs, alternative education settings, and after-school programs.
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Led by Chief Isku Kua Yawanawa, COTR raises funds to maximize the impact of Isku
Vakehuhu, Yawanawa School of Language and Cultural Studies. Isku Vakehuhu is a
traditional school in the heart of Yawanawa territory, which serves as a model of cultural
reclamation and language revitalization.
This 3 year project will conduct a randomized controlled trial on Biofield Therapies for treating anxiety, with purposeful recruitment and sampling of BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities. Our current data indicate that delivering a biofield-based sound therapy was feasible and effective for substantially reducing anxiety. However, because feasibility studies do not have control or comparison groups and are done on a very small group of people, and because we had a very brief intervention with no follow-up measurements, it is unknown whether
1) this approach is helpful for a more diverse population (including BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities) suffering from anxiety
2) how long the effects might last after the intervention is over
3) whether reductions in anxiety are comparable to relaxation or other gold-standard approaches for clinical care.
We hope to answer these questions and provide an evidence base for holistic care for anxiety in a diverse population. If Biofield Therapies is shown to be helpful and effective for persons with anxiety, this therapy can be considered by healthcare administrators to be integrated into clinic and hospital settings, allowing us to more readily integrate holistic therapies into healthcare and self-care.
]]>Sociocracy For All (SoFA) aims to spread the use of egalitarian, sociocratic governance. SoFA provides content and training, supporting networks and communities of practice among people in similar sectors and language groups.
The Metasynthesis and Research on Sociocracy (MARS) project systematizes, advances, and curates the research on sociocracy and in decentralized, consent-based organizations in general. MARS has a special focus on three focus areas:
It will provide high-quality information for practitioners on what research shows in useful measures around those focus areas in the context of self-management. We hope to build a stronger case for our work and our colleagues to strengthen the movement overall. We’re also excited about stimulating more academic research on sociocracy and helping to focus that research around questions that are particularly useful for the field.
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