Highline will host multiple YELL summits next month, including — for the first time — one for white allies.

The YELL (Young Educated Ladies Leading) summit was founded seven years ago, said Rashad Norris, who is Highline’s director of Community Engagement and co-founder of the event.

The summit is an empowering communal event for women of color that has seen large turnouts in the past. 

Though the original event is just for women of color, this year a version will also be held for white female and non-binary students. Both summits will have virtual events every Wednesday in May.

The first event for the new summit for white students will be held through Zoom on May 5, with the title “Seeing Race,” and a focus on the construct of race, namely discussing what it is and how it was constructed. The second event, which will be on May 12 via Zoom, is called “Mind Your Bias,” and is all about mindfulness and implicit bias. The third event, taking place via Zoom on May 19, is called “How Did I Come to Be White?” and the fourth one, “Silence is Violence,” will be where the action piece comes in, and will take place through Zoom on May 26.

The YELL summit for women of color will also have its first event through Zoom on May 5 with the title “I’m Speaking,” local activist Rosa Clemente as the keynote speaker, and a panel of women in politics. Events will be held via Zoom on May 12, 19, and 26 as well, but the titles and speakers for these dates have yet to be announced. 

Norris said he wants to give participants a safe space.

“We hope to provide a space for these young ladies to come to, just because of COVID and all the other civil and racial injustice that’s been going on in our community,” he said. “We’re really just hoping to have a safe space virtually, to offer a dialogue with people who look like them, and to have speakers who look like them.” 

The new event for white-identified female and non-binary students came about for several reasons, said Shannon Waits, who is Highline’s director of Academic Assessment and Placement.

“I think because of the context with where we are as a country, with the uprisings we’ve seen since spring, and the clarity that white supremacy and white racial violence are on the rise in our country and need to end, the Black and Brown YELL committee thought it was really important to engage white folks in this,” said Waits, who is a member of the organizing committee for the new summit. 

She said the increased capacity due to the event moving online because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was also a factor.

The new series of events will focus on educating participants about the history of race and white supremacy in America while also showing them what their next steps as allies should look like, officials on the committee said.

The overall theme will be “Moving From Listening To Action: Respect, Responsibility, and Racial Justice,” said Mary Weir, who is the program manager for prison-based education in the Criminal Justice department at Highline.

Weir, who is also a member of the organizing committee for the summit, said the goal for the summit is twofold, with a joint focus on education and action.

“Our first goal is education, building that critical awareness about the concept of race and its construction, how implicit bias lives within our bodies, and interrogating how students might understand themselves as white people,” Weir said. “And the inspiration piece is really critical. We’re hoping to inspire folks to take action.”

Other members of the committee said they foresee several potential struggles, including Zoom fatigue.

“We’re inviting youth who may have been in Zoom school for more than a year now to do a little more Zoom-ing,” said Jennifer Johnston, who is a faculty member with Highline’s Health Care Professions Department. “Even though our programming is super interactive, and we have really great facilitators, it does involve more time in front of a screen that we’re all weary of.”

“I also think it’ll be interesting to see how much high schools support and send students,” Waits added. “Just like how there’s pushback when there’s anything just for Black and brown youth, there’s pushback about ‘Why is there something for white folks?’ so I think that’s something that there could be some pushback with, but I know the YELL Black and Brown committee has been dealing with that for a decade already.”

The summit, which will be held every Wednesday in May through Zoom, will have specific schedules built in to maximize learning.

“There will be four different events and they’ll be going from 1 to 4 p.m.,” said Allison Reibel, who is a part time faculty member in Highline’s Library Reference Services department. “Each day will have the same opening and closing procedures for 30 minutes to bring us all together and hopefully create community and trust, and each day there will be a different workshop.”

Reibel said the events will connect but also work by themselves.

“We know some people may just be coming for one day and some may be coming for the entire session, so I think they’ll all work as standalones, but they will also build on one another,” she said.

The events will be open to any white-identified female and non-binary students aged 16-24 who are interested in attending.

Waits said she’s looking forward to the “Seeing Race” event most of all.

“I think it’s a huge thing for white folks in particular to understand that race was created so that [they] could have access to land and possessions,” she said. “That’s what this is about, and that’s how it’s been used to get us to where we are now. To me, that’s just such a critical piece for people to understand when we’re talking about race and racism so we can take it off our individual selves and really understand that it is something that was created in order to build and maintain a system of white supremacy.”

Reibel said she’s looking forward to sparking new conversations.

“I’m just excited for all the events and for students to be able to start these conversations that they may not have had before and be able to look at whiteness — something that’s often seen as invisible or neutral — and to hopefully just give participants a different way of looking at things,” she said.

Weir said she is also excited for all the events but has one she is specifically looking forward to attending.

“I’m particularly excited for the second one which is going to be led by Space Between, a nonprofit,” she said. “That one is really going to be focused on mindfulness and implicit bias and — I’m hoping — really give some tools for thinking about these topics and how they live in the body. I’m really looking forward to that one as someone who can hopefully learn a lot from the group as well.”

Those interested in signing up for the YELL summit for women of color should click here, while those hoping to attend the one for white-identified female and non-binary students should click here.