Please join us this Friday, July 17th as we speak with @Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz for our next A Better Normal discussion at 3 p.m. EST. This conversation, hosted by @Christine Cissy White and moderated by @Alison Cebulla will be about building community, ending poverty, and parenting with ACEs. Rebecca will share her personal story as well as her work with families, schools, and communities.
Rebecca is a role model, mentor, and has become a friend. She is humble, honest, and hopeful. Her optimism is infectious because it's believable. She's what my cousin Jenny calls, "a glue person," - someone who gathers people and ideas together and makes them all stick for the time it takes to make meaningful change.
About Rebecca's Lewis-Pankratz (in her own words)
"At age 37, I was living in a trailer house with my three little boys that should have been condemned. Everyday was beyond a struggle. My life had taught me two things. Hard work. Survival. I grew up poor, dropped out of high school on my sixteenth birthday and was doing a fantastic job of repeating the cycle. I was exhausted, frustrated and bankrupt as a mother. Then by accident I bumped up against a non-profit that helped people get out of pOVERty. They wrapped support around me, fed me powerful doses of hope and taught me a better way. Later I ended up running that non-profit and building it into the largest and most successful Circles site in the country. I watched family after family repeat my journey completely out of generational pOVERty.
Educators found me. I have been working with districts and communities every since. I currently also direct ten high school completion programs in the State of Kansas. I work with some tough kids. "Those kids" are "my kids". My work to resolve pOVERty within education and communities is robust. The trauma-informed movement, with community collaboration and restorative justice principles puts us ALL in a winnable game. We can resolve pOVERty and make sure that it is no longer our students OR their families destination. I am passionate about helping ALL people find the tools necessary to turn kids from at-risk to at-promise!"
Topics we will discuss:
Rebecca's Story.
Poverty circles and Parenting with ACEs.
How ACEs Science nurtures compassion, camaraderie, and opportunities for community-created change.
- How Rebecca connects, "the brain on poverty and the brain on trauma," as she says.
Why including students & parents is necessary when creating trauma-informed-responsive-sensitive schools and communities and how Rebecca does so.
I hope you will join this discussion. Click here to register.
"I always tell people that in the trauma-informed world, it's less about the bad stuff that happened to you and more about the power of healing collectively."
Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz
More about Rebecca and her work:
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