The 11th annual Leadership Forum on Early Education Research, Policy, and Practice featured 60 presentations that showcased early educators’ innovations and ideas to improve ECE quality and business management, and to promote entrepreneurship, racial equity, systems change, and other reforms. All of the presenters were alumni of Early Education Leaders’ leadership programs, which now count more than 1000 graduates.

Iyanna Nelson, a Leading for Change alum from the program we offer in partnership with the Maryland Early Childhood Leadership Program (MECLP), based at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a student support teacher for the Howard County Public School System, shared a spoken-word poem she wrote as part of Leading for Change’s leadership development self-portrait, an experience that helps educators to see their greatest strengths, unique assets, and talents and how they might use them to be more effective in driving change.

Nelson’s piece focused in part on the importance of planning, organizing, collective action, and caring for self and others to move through challenges and conflict:

“I accept there will be challenges, I will not be still. I will be a driver of change—mistakes and all.

I believe in the ripple effect of improvement: when educators are learning and well, so are their students.

“I will build care into my life and contribute to healing myself and others. Self preservation is an act of resistance.

“So today I will network, find my people, rest. For tomorrow, until we all get what we need, I will persist on.”