Financing Transformations in Education - An Inquiry

This week's episode is a special selection of conversations with
some amazing educators and entrepreneurs who are creating vital
educational spaces that tackle social, spatial and environmental
injustice, build individual and community well-being and
livelihoods, and develop personal agency. All three of them are
achieving this, in part, by radically rethinking approaches to
the way that education has historically been funded and seeking
out alternative innovative approaches that create leverage points
for educational systems change with very exciting potential.


Dr. Akira Drake Rodriguez writes about race, cities, and space in
the US.  She is currently an Assistant Professor at the
University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design. Akira’s
book, Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of
Atlanta's Public Housing (University of Georgia Press 2021),
examines the dialectic between black feminist politics and public
housing policy in Atlanta from 1936 to 2010.  She was
recently awarded a grant from the Spencer Foundation to study
critical participatory planning strategies in school facilities
planning in Philadelphia. 


Akira was the convener and lead author on Transforming Public
Education: A green new deal for K–12 public schools, an
initiative of the Climate + Community Project, sponsored by The
McHarg Center and Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative.


Ana Aguirre is a co-founder and worker owner at TAZEBAEZ S.Coop
where she leads the cooperative development area. She is the Vice
President for the International Cooperative Alliance Youth
network in Europe, where she also serves in the youth executive
committee. Among many other projects, she currently co-leads the
course on Platform Cooperatives NOW! with The New School (NYC)
and Mondragon. Ana studied at Mondragon Team Academy in the first
class of the Leadership Entrepreneurship and Innovation (LEINN)
degree.


Lucy Stephens is the founder, Co-Headteacher and Charity Director
of The New School in south London, UK. With experience gained
from a background in teaching, degrees in social psychology,
nutritional therapy and herbal medicine, time spent working at
the Prince’s Trust with marginalised young people, and having two
of her own children, Lucy has focused her attention on what an
alternative democratic model of education could look like. She
founded The New School to put research into practice, to
challenge the current paradigm, and to address the many deeply
entrenched problems in education and society.