The Source School

06/12/2025

06/12/2025

Really looking forward to this!

One practice has the potential to effect enormous change: . Join us for a live webinar exploring how deeper listening can transform how we lead, connect, and co-create change.

📅 June 25 | 1:00–3:00 PM (ET)

🔗www.nonprofitmaine.org/events/learning-to-listen-june-2025

About the Presenter: Jennifer Chace is the co-founder and executive director of The Source School, a coming alongside schools to strengthen the human capacity to care, understand, and transform, creating schools where each of us feels hope and knows we matter.



Thank you to MANP’s Education Programs Sponsors: Healey & Associates and Mainebiz!

05/27/2024

Thank you for sharing this information Isabel Wilkerson. You are correct — we don’t know our own history. And for young people to consciously work together to create a better future, they need accurate information about the mistakes and successes of our past.

I so love this image of one of the earliest commemorations of Memorial Day, which arose from the ashes of the Civil War.
What we now call Memorial Day was first observed on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, SC, where thousands of newly freed Black people marched, prayed and laid flowers in gratitude to the Union soldiers whose sacrifice had helped liberate them from slavery.
After the Confederates evacuated Charleston at the end of the war in April 1865, Black residents cleaned the site of a mass grave of 257 Union soldiers. The laborers dug out the bodies and gave the soldiers a proper burial.
That May 1, nearly 10,000 people, most of them formerly enslaved African-Americans, joined by union troops and northern White missionaries, gathered to dedicate the burial ground and honor the fallen.
Among the former slaves were 3,000 Black children, like those pictured here, who would become among the first African-Americans ever permitted to go to school in the South with the opening of new Freedom Schools.
The people sang and laid flowers on the gravesite. The New York Tribune described it as “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

A tragedy that so much of our country’s true history has been withheld from us — we don’t know who we are as a nation, don’t know what we’re celebrating, don’t know how we got to where we are, and thus we don’t know how to fix what ails and divides us. It’s time that we learn our history and act upon it for the salvation of our democracy.

05/09/2024

I spent two thought provoking and inspiring days at MIT this week. Monday was collaborative workshops and networking with others using social dialog tools for listening to underheard voices. , and others. Wow I met some amazing people! Tuesday’s event was an invited symposium: Trust and Human Connection in an Age of AI and Social Medua. Izzy George, one of The Source School’s We Listen student leaders from Freeport HS, and I spent the day with other .ai partners and thought leaders in AI, social media, and democracy from MIT, Harvard, UVA, U Wisconsin, Brown, and others. You can see us with Dimitra, head of translational research , who has been such a support to We Listen programming. Izzy’s discussions with youth leaders from Newark and Philadelphia are already leading to new collaborations to strengthen student agency, mattering, and ultimately — HOPE. Stay tuned for more on what we learned in the coming days.

04/07/2024

Students from our We Listen team at Freeport High School shared their work at the New England Youth Identity Summit. (Slides show some of the tools they use to understand students’ school experience, courtesy of .ai, and data visualizations created with them by member Maggie H.) They did a great job hosting 20 or so participants and offered a generous listening space for their peers to have conversation about 1. Their relationships at school with adults and students, 2. Their experiences being seen and heard, or not, at school, and 3. Their visions for their own schools and how they’d like to be involved in decision making to create those futures. Students and adults from Lewiston, South Portland, Waynflete, Brewster Academy, and Chewonki’s attended. Thank you and for hosting!

03/13/2024

So excited to visit the Maine Mobile Bio Lab at its first stop at Fort Kent Elementary, in grades 5-8. Principal Nadeau, with Educate Maine educators, looks almost as happy as the students engaged in exploring invasive species remediation!

03/01/2024

Trust is built through action. Taking action together toward a shared vision builds mutual trust and feelings of hope and mattering in youth. We Listen: Data-Informed Civic Engagement has room for two more high schools to join the cohort. Contact us for more information!

01/25/2024

Greetings from Ms Blair in Fort Kent! We’ve been working with the Valley Unified district since last winter doing strategic community listening through Maine ED 2050 and then using that learning to create strategic education priorities to advance student, educator, and community goals. A bonus was getting to support classroom teachers in different schools reconnect to their feeling of purpose as educators and strengthen relationships with their students. Creating daily rituals to affirm and care for ourselves, refusing to succumb to constantly feeling hectic, and taking the extra second to look a student in the eye and show true care go a long way toward classrooms where students and teachers feel they matter and are happy and ready to learn. Nothing better than seeing educators sparked with enthusiasm and ready to inspire their students to find their own purpose in life. 🌟

01/25/2024

Hello from Ms Blair at Fort Kent Elementary! We have been working with Valley Unified since last winter, first doing strategic listening with the full Fort Kent community through lots of small recorded focus groups and then creating a framework of strategic education priorities to advance community priorities. A bonus this year was getting to support classroom educators to reconnect to their own calling and purpose and to strengthen relationships with their students. Featured here is second grade teacher Ms Blair!
Creating daily rituals to affirm ourselves and our purpose and refusing to succumb to feeling hectic all day go miles toward a classroom where teacher and students alike feel grounded and happy and ready to learn. 🌟

10/27/2023

It’s never too early to think about how we as individuals and as Mainers can act to prevent horrifying events such as the one Lewiston, and all of Maine, has just suffered. Inward action — feeling love, compassion, and true care for each of us — and the outward action that is evidence of that true care — policy. WE in Maine can create the Maine where this doesn’t happen — by privileging the right to live life over the right to take life. Our young people need to hope that the future can be better. How do we help build that hope? How do we counter despair! By taking action. How else can they trust us? WE in Maine can do it. The love is here.

10/15/2023

When the world makes space for us to strive toward the future we imagine, we can have hope. Students need the adults in schools to make room for their dreams, imaginations of futures unimaginable by adults.