Beyond the Fellowship

The meeting started with a lighthearted mood, as students and families mingled around the tables of snacks and pizza. The Ludlow cheer team even gave an energetic performance that was met with loud cheers. But once the District’s presentation started, the mood quickly turned somber and outraged. Based on conversations I’d had with students and families at our after school program, I knew that the Ludlow community was feeling uncertain, afraid, and mistreated by the decisions coming from the District. As a majority Black and Brown neighborhood, people in this community have a long history of being sidelined and exploited to create profit for others, while the needs of their own community and especially their children are ignored. 

The representatives from the District began by stating that the plan they were presenting was still only a draft, so they were still open to changes based on the opinions of the affected communities. According to their current plan, Ludlow would be closed beginning in the fall of 2027, with their students split between three schools: Dunbar, Spring Garden, and Kearny. It’s important to note that these three schools are all between 0.7 and 1 mile away from Ludlow. The Ludlow building would at that point be conveyed to the City to be renovated and reassigned for affordable housing. Ludlow teachers and other staff would also be retained and reassigned to other schools within the District. 

The District representatives then began taking questions and comments from the community members in the audience, prioritizing Ludlow students first. Every single student, family member, staff member, and community member who spoke expressed their vehement opposition to the plan. A Ludlow eighth grader questioned the logic of the District spending money on the plan to close the school, when they could instead spend those funds to renovate the school and bring it into compliance with the District’s facility standards. 

Three of my after school students, all third and fourth graders, spoke up as well, declaring their love for their school community and emphatically stating that no other school could replace Ludlow. They spoke about the importance of having a school in their own community, how their parents and grandparents had graduated from Ludlow and they were determined to graduate from Ludlow as well. One of my students sobbed inconsolably into the mic, begging the District not to separate her from her friends. 

Ann Moss, a Ludlow alumna and community member who partners with TCS’s after school program, spoke about her experiences with school closures in the 60s. Her voice broke with emotion speaking about the fear and violence that she and her fellow students encountered when they had to cross into dangerous neighborhoods to get to their new schools. Other community members agreed, voicing concerns about the unsafe areas that their students would have to commute through to get to Kearny, Spring Garden, and Dunbar. 

Several teachers also spoke up against the plan. They described the professional support they received as members of the Ludlow staff family, and expressed trepidation about being reassigned to another school. A few teachers said that they felt insulted by the District’s assessment of their school as having “poor program alignment,” and brought forward examples of Ludlow’s excellent academic achievement, extraordinary support services for disabled and neurodivergent students, and rich network of extracurricular opportunities, including TCS. Other community members brought up concerns that this facilities plan was just the latest effort in a long history of racial and economic discrimination against this neighborhood. The majority Black and Brown students and families would be pushed out, while Ludlow was repurposed to attract gentrifiers. 

During this meeting, I found myself reflecting on my own connection to Ludlow. While I am not a staff member or family member, I have built meaningful relationships with my after school students and their families. I’ve witnessed firsthand the tight-knit support systems that help students thrive at this school, and I’ve heard from my own students how devastating it would be to lose Ludlow. When we first heard about the plan to close Ludlow, my co-teacher Kayla Johnson (FAO Schwarz Fellow ‘24) said that all she could think about was how the previous week, one of our seventh-grade students had announced that he wanted to keep coming to TCS until he graduated. He had been attending after school with us since the program’s inception four years ago, and in that time, Kayla has seen him grow so much as an artist and as a human being. It broke Kayla’s and my hearts to think that we might be separated from him for his final year of middle school. The week after the plan was announced, another student had quietly asked me if, when Ludlow closed, he would still be able to come to TCS. I knew that I couldn’t honestly say yes. Dunbar, Kearny, and Spring Garden are all located significantly further away from the studio, which would present logistical problems for pick-up from school. We will also likely not be able to host after school programs for all three schools, and we can’t guarantee that all of our current students will be assigned to the same new school. 

Instead of saying yes to that student, I told him that we were going to do everything we could to make sure that Ludlow didn’t close. Since then, the TCS team has attended rallies and School District Board meetings, coordinated with Ludlow families and community members, hosted a sign-making session, and attended as many Facilities Planning Process meetings as we could. 

From the outside, these initiatives may seem strange; protesting Ludlow’s closure doesn’t seem like it would be an ordinary part of a teaching artist’s job description. But my time at The Clay Studio has taught me that real social change and community investment extends far beyond the doors of the studio. As after school teaching artists, we are just one small part of the complex ecosystem that makes up a child’s world. On our own, our impact is limited. 

But the incredible part about our work is that we do not act alone. 

Since we opened our doors on N. American St., The Clay Studio has been dedicated to thoughtfully and ethically integrating ourselves into the neighborhoods of Fishtown and Olde Kensington by connecting with community partners, businesses, and institutions. When community partners like Ludlow are under attack, it’s our responsibility to help them fight back, the same way they would fight for us.

For the longest time, I couldn’t articulate why this was such a transformative experience. I had been in rooms full of brown people before – I had a big family and frequently attended South Asian community events – but nothing had ever felt the way that affinity group did. Years after the fact, I came across a post shared by writer Blair Imani that made it all click: “Having shared identities doesn’t automatically create community. Shared values are key.” The people in that space weren’t just South Asian; they were South Asians I had met at a youth leadership conference, who were all committed to creating positive social change. 

However, the clarity that realization provided was fleeting. Almost as soon as I found my answer to that initial question, another question arose: If the secret to community was shared values, why was it so difficult for me to find other South Asians who shared my values? Why, when I joined social justice-focused student organizations at my university, did I rarely see people who looked like me? Why, after so many years, had I not been able to find the same sense of belonging I had experienced in 2018? 

As the sociology student that I was, I turned to the literature for answers. Knee-deep in a research journal, I came across an article that deconstructed the relationship between the model minority myth and Asian American activism. I had known about the myth through lived experience, but my sociology education had helped me to understand that it was much more pernicious than the “Asians are smart” stereotype might initially suggest. As I had learned, this was a narrative intentionally invented and pushed by white supremacists in the wake of civil rights movement, and its purpose was to dismiss systemic racism by making an example of a select group of academically and financially successful Asian Americans. The myth fed the argument that upward mobility was achievable for all through hard work and falsely suggested that racial disparities were a product of individual failures, rather than systemic barriers.

The article I found deepened my understanding of the model minority myth as it pertains to Asian American involvement in social justice efforts. It perpetuates, among other things, “the monolithic image of Asian Americans as successful in society and thus unaffected by racial oppression and uninterested in activism” (Yi & Todd 2024). With this given, it began to make sense to me that internalization of the myth – which occurs when Asian Americans believe the stereotypes associated with the model minority image – may manifest in decreased engagement with social justice efforts. Given the ubiquity of those stereotypes, I had observed internalization of the myth to be a common phenomenon. 

As I conducted interviews for my own senior thesis research, a qualitative study that explored South Asian American identity within the context of the model minority myth, I came across participants who similarly struggled with finding community. One interviewee shared her journey in finding “South Asian friends who are also activists” after growing up around brown people who she described as unengaged in advocacy (Patel 2024). 

Given everything I had learned from my research and from my lived experiences, it became clear to me that building community would require finding South Asians who actively resisted the model minority myth, and felt a deep necessity to create positive social change. When I received the offer to become an FAO Schwarz Fellow at Reading Partners in New York City, little did I know that the move would lead me to find exactly that. Both within and outside of work, I’ve met people who exist at the intersection of my identity and values. From the folks I’ve met in the AAPI affinity space at Reading Partners to those I’ve gotten to know through my weekly yoga class at Saratoga Park, one of the best things to happen since moving to NYC has been finding people who have helped to recreate the feeling I first experienced seven years ago.