Landon Mascareñaz, VP of Community Partnerships at CO Education Initiative, answers: How do you develop an open mindset?
Thinking about- how do you help people? I mean, the hardest part is mindset. Do you have thoughts on how you help, at multiple levels, across an organization, how do you help people develop that mindset? It's a critical question. This is why I think thinking about leadership is so important. And about the, the ability to say, "are you open in yourself for the possibilities?" And it's one of the reasons why we've chosen, kind of, the connotation of "open." There's a lot of very technical terms out there for what we're all talking about. But "open" carries deep schema for people in their lives. Children understand "open," we understand. "Open" translates across languages really well. And I think that that's one of the reasons why we've moved to this language to allow kind of a deeper conversation about our personal blocks. And this is critical back to this leadership question for democracy, Shani, like if schools are the forge of our democracy and where most of our parents and families encounter democracy for the very first time, and it's a place where their voice doesn't matter or gets diluted and the structures don't respond to it, then no wonder we are seeing such challenges across our society and democracy. And so we have to talk about that from a mindset perspective about openness in yourself, the organization in your community, and the implications of a closed model have; not only just for your classroom but beyond.
