We interviewed Rich, the founder and CEO of DREAMS & DUCATS.
1) Can you share the inspiration behind creating DREAMS & DUCATS focused on helping young people discover their self-love, passion, and purpose through the lens of art and culture?
Two prompts or trajectories inspired DREAMS & DUCATS:
My personal educational experience, including the resources, teachers, counselors, and mentors, has shaped me and played a significant role in my journey.
Values are found in community and culture, which I believe are potent and rich sources of education and learning.
There wasn’t much space for me to explore my interests, feel affirmed in what I wanted to do, or dream about my future and talk about it. So, DREAMS & DUCATS is a platform offering young people today the opportunity to explore and express themselves. Art and culture serve as vehicles and lenses for this exploration. By harnessing the power of art and culture, we provide deep exploration and a broad range of learning and educational experiences for young people.
Being able to harness the power of art and culture for engagement and deep enrichment is more relevant and relatable to young people. It doesn’t make sense that art and culture are often seen as mutually exclusive and separate from education. They can coexist, especially with the current cuts to art classes and school funding. Art and culture thrive regardless of school funding. Art is used as a simulation and strategy to elevate and prepare people for the world.
2) How does your platform measure the impact of its learning experiences on the youth you serve? Can you share any success stories?
We have a couple of different measures to guide how we view the impacts on young people. The first is to see our young people feel more confident. As young people go through a learning experience, having a sense of engagement with the learning experience has really helped contribute to and elevate their personal confidence. It is a wonder what the right space and ecosystem support can do for a young person who may not know how to do something. That is what our “Journey to Impact” program is all about. It is designed for young people who might feel unseen, unheard, and misunderstood, and it accelerates and enhances personal confidence. That is our primary measure.
The second measure is how young people continue to engage in art, culture, and education as part of a lifelong learning process, adopting these behaviors after our program. We really want to keep an eye on whether those young people continue to engage in the activities and ideas we provide and offer. That is another key measure of success in terms of how we, as an organization, measure our progress and impact.
There are many success stories. The first that comes to mind is not just one story but several. A lot of our youth-centered work is rooted in creative entrepreneurship. We work regularly at Helix Charter High School as part of their business and entrepreneurship pathway. Each year, we help about 25 to 30 senior students build businesses as part of their class-recommended projects. These are students who express an interest in business and entrepreneurship, and with our help, they create businesses.
It is really cool to see the ideas, in the spirit of young people, both individually and collectively, develop from concept to completion. After their graduation, we see them continue to build their brands and businesses while staying connected. One notable instance is a really cool brand called Black Pilots. We helped them build the business in class, and after graduation, they continued to print tote bags and crew neck sweaters and be active and present in the community. These are some of the cool and successful stories we see.
3) The education system often focuses on academic success as the primary measure of a student’s potential. How does your organization help young people redefine success beyond academics?
That is a great question. It is a question I really love. I think the education system is very linear and confined to standards, whether they are state or federal. It is very rigid in how it offers education and knowledge. I feel that it defines young people’s success based on marks - A, B, C, D, and F. I think that is a narrow way.
A true way to honor and build up young people is to measure real progress. At our organization, we help young people understand that there are other measures of success. These measures include personal fulfillment, personal creativity, and energy that is authentic in alignment with their interests. That, for us, is what we feel we are doing to help young people redefine success. We work with students in schools and with young people during out-of-school time when they have a chance to explore new content and ideas without attaching themselves to the outcome in terms of grades and marks.
I think this gives them more space to explore the content and knowledge more authentically and genuinely. It is really cool that it comes from within them, rather than the unilateral and direct experience they have with the education system. The current education system often involves one-way communication of knowledge, where young people are expected to simply absorb and regurgitate information for tests. That is a very limiting way of learning. For us, being able to give them an opportunity to learn and explore success outside those bounds is how we hope to redefine education beyond academics.
4) You mentioned the need for an overhaul of the current education system. If you could implement one major change nationwide, what would it be?
I think the biggest change I would make is that schools are not ground zero or the primary hub for educational learning. Schools have a lot of equity in their infrastructure, size, facilities, and resources. However, the education system really needs to take a close look at what it means to decentralize education from a single site.
I believe the community has a significant role to play in elevating, enhancing, enriching, and adapting to a new model of education that still supports teachers in the traditional system but also harnesses the power of the community as a source of equal, if not greater, enrichment learning for young people.
I see educational or community hubs of learning that young people can tap into during “regular school hours” or “on weekends.” Currently, the system treats school and other forms of learning as separate things, like a vertical line: school here and learning happening over there in a different sector. I feel like there needs to be a fusion or cohesion between community-based opportunities and traditional learning infrastructure.
5) Looking towards the future, how do you envision your platform evolving to meet the needs of future generations? Are there any new programs that are coming up?
Yes. For us, as we look ahead or focus on our current commitments, we are really invested in understanding what system change looks like. We shift the paradigm of learning in ways that positively affect not only the community and students but also the educators and leaders who are really charged with leading that ship for these groups of young people. How we are doing in a way is giving equal emphasis to their own learning and development as a model for what young people can point at and look at it as far as progress and growth.
We envision DREAMS & DUCATS as a leader in professional development for educators, a leader helps them build capacity for expanded thinking, creativity, and personal well-being. These are the primary means for creating more meaningful and deeply engaging learning experiences for young people. Many educators and leaders have this burning fire but often face discouragement, burnout, and challenges that affect the quality of their teaching and curriculum design. This is dangerous for young people who might already be disengaged from the traditional education system because of rigid content and standards.
We really try to revitalize, rejuvenate, and reenergize educators. We start to think differently and open up the aperture for the possibility of really challenging the status quo. We have some great skills and confidence as an organization, particularly in producing events, that are really anchored around deep meaningful personal growth and development. We have developed the ASCEND program for educators, which consists of workshops and multi-day conference-type events. These bring small groups of educators into intentional, curiosity-driven spaces to reconnect with their passion and purpose, using that energy to reimagine their approach to the learning system.
Looking to the future, we will support teachers through dynamic and innovative professional development. This is an area that has not evolved in the same way as student education standards and content. That is a need in that space. That is really going to drive a real systematic change. That is how we get to scale our work and impact by reaching teachers at the top levels, and administrators at the county office level. That is our envisioning right now.
6) Partnerships can be crucial for amplifying impact. How does your organization collaborate with schools, communities, and other stakeholders to enrich youth development?
We have several ways of partnering with people and institutions. When it comes to schools and institutional partners (governments, museums, small businesses), we try to create opportunities for training and development. We offer a range of solutions and programs tailored to our partners' specific challenges.
For schools, we help design new programming and connect them to community-based resources and ecosystems for learning and support. We also work with teachers on professional development, as I mentioned earlier.
In the community, we partner with small business owners and entrepreneurs, particularly in the creative economy, to provide training and technical support. Additionally, we serve as partners in youth work by connecting young people with an interest in their fields to internships and other opportunities.
At the community level, we strengthen the bonds between community members, small businesses, young people, students, and the education system. This is how we operate on that front.
For other stakeholders, our collaboration is generating an audience for our collective and shared mission to enhance and elevate young people.
7) Lastly, for someone interested in supporting your mission, what are the best ways to get involved with your organization?
For anyone interested in learning more about our mission, I would invite them first just to really visit our website. We have some updated information that really digs into what we do, how we do it, and what our vision is, for us moving ahead. I would also say that for folks who are just looking for community, looking into engaging with us organizationally, or broadly community, come up for an event. Invite people to check out our events, to get a feel for the mission, the work, and how we move in the community, to get a chance to meet like-minded people, and have an interest in youth empowerment. For those folks who might really be on fire, I would say donate on Facebook, Instagram, and our website. There is an opportunity for us to grow, scale up our work to hire program facilitators, build up our capacity internally, and help push the mission forward. Just reach out, and drop us a line. That is the best way to get involved now.
