Staff Blog Week 1 - Anthony Montas

Staff Blog Week 1

By Anthony Montas – Teaching Artist Assistant, Workshop/Advocacy

What an amazing first week it has been back in Shubert for another year of the City Spotlights Leadership Program. This week was all about strengthening our community of leaders and getting a sense for what the rest of the summer will hold. We began the week by doing our staple Social Justice Bootcamp with the teens, making sure they were well-versed with the vocabulary and tools that empower social justice work. One of my personal favorite activities we do during this week is the Intersectionality Walk, where we have teens move around different stations and discuss their responses to different prompts that pertain to how much attention they place in different parts of their identity. This activity always gets teens thinking and engaging with one another as connections form and relationships begin to bud. This year, we have quite a few returns coming back. This makes it so that we as staff have even more help getting the new teens acclimated to the way the program works. Seeing how the returners have been engaging and educating the new teens has been incredible to me as a staff member. I get to see the leaps and bounds of growth from the previous year to this one. It also doesn’t hurt that it means way fewer new names to learn. Overall, I am really excited to see how much closer this group gets with one another, because we are already seeing some really great collaborations blossom.