Join 100Kin10 in lifting up the voices of STEM learners across the country!

This is a guest post by Teresa Mooney, Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives at 100k in 10.

100Kin10 is honored to invite teachers from across the country to join the unCommission, a massively diverse and participatory process to identify a set of interlocking goals for the future of STEM learning and opportunity. These goals will shape the vision for what it will take to achieve equitable STEM education for all of our country’s children, with an explicit focus on Black, Latinx, and Native American communities. To do this, the unCommission will listen to the stories of hundreds of young people across the country, ages 13-29, to hear about their authentic experiences in STEM learning, which we will use as the basis of these goals. Learn more about the process here.

The unCommission is coordinated by 100Kin10, which began in 2011, with 28 organizations banding together and making public commitments to respond to President Obama’s call for 100,000 new, excellent STEM teachers in ten years. We are proud to be poised to meet and likely exceed this goal, and we are just getting started. We look forward to taking up one of the unCommission’s goals as our next moonshot to guide the next phase of 100Kin10’s work. As we look to the next decade, we know that our next call to action cannot come from people in suits sitting behind a closed door. Rather, it must arise from those who have been farthest from the opportunities of STEM learning and the workforce, and the process that surfaces it must be worthy of the systemic change it demands. 

As we begin a new school year, we hope that teachers will join this work to lift up the voices of their students to help inform what the next set of STEM policy goals for the future must be. Please consider signing on to serve as a storytelling host, which the unCommission is calling an anchor. As an anchor, you would be tasked with identifying and engaging at least five young people, or storytellers, and supporting them to submit their short story (~15-minute activity!) about their STEM learning experience. 

If you’re interested in joining us, here are your next steps: 

1. Sign on officially as an anchor! If you’d like to officially be named on the unCommission website as an anchor for this work, you can sign on here. By officially signing on, you are also eligible to receive a stipend for up to $500 to support this work, your classroom, or your school.
2. Share this storytelling opportunity with your students! We have created a deck that you can use to facilitate a storytelling session with your students, which is also a great get-to-know-you activity as you kick off the new year.* If you’re crunched for time, you can also simply share with them the storytelling platform link! To show gratitude to all of our storytellers, we will be giving each storyteller who submits a story a $25 Loop&Tie gift of their choosing (collections are curated to be young person friendly!). We ask that stories be submitted by September 30 October 15.

You can learn more about the anchor role here. You can also learn more from the 100Kin10 staff by attending their office hours, offered each Thursday from 3-4 pm EST, or by reaching out to uncommission@100kin10.org. 

We can only solve our biggest STEM challenges by hearing from students like yours!

*Please note that for students under 18, their parent/guardian will need to provide consent on the platform before their child can officially submit their story. If you’re leading a storytelling session with your students, 100Kin10 can share email language that you can share with parents/guardians ahead of time.