My life has been transformed by travel. I've been to all seven continents and to communities across Oregon, and each trip challenged my assumptions. Travel made me a more critical thinker and more open to other people's perspectives and lived experiences. It taught me to see nuance, complexity, and the possibility of working together.
While receiving my Masters in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, I took a course on climate change, war, and genocide. It showed me how competition over shared resources can fuel conflict, and how conflict, real or perceived, can escalate to violence. As polarization and division grow in our own country, I keep coming back to that lesson.
After years in education, first in my own middle school classroom and then leading programs for educators in Holocaust education and civics, I've seen what teachers can do when they have the time, support, and relationships to go deeper. Sustained, cohort-based learning changes practice in ways a single workshop can't. And civics comes alive when students learn it through geography, grounded in the rivers, farms, and towns where real decisions play out.
Common Ground Learning Collaborative brings these threads together. Shared resources can divide communities, but they can also be where communities find common ground. Place & Perspective offers educators the kind of experience that changed me: learning in a new place, alongside others, and coming home to see and teach about their own community differently.