By and For The Community : How Community-centered Work Must Be Willing to Change & Adapt to Community Needs

In the fall of 2023, I started my Millennium Fellowship project, a semester-long leadership development program focused on social impact. It looked worlds different than it looks now: a community organization focused on creating a space and community that provides the structure, tools, resources, and representation that student activists have difficulty accessing or harnessing in order to make change locally.

My project originated in high school with a few classmates; when I took it up again at Pace University in New York City, I was working individually for the first time because the project was so place-based in my hometown, Brookline, Massachusetts. Originally called “Supporting Educators with Asian American and Pacific Islander Curriculum” (SEAAPIC), the goal of the project was to create an online repository of lesson plans focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander culture and history for the educators in my hometown public school district. In 2020, Brookline High School (BHS) activists successfully advocated for increased support and representation of the Asian American population, however these resources did not trickle down to the elementary and middle school levels. As much as educators wanted to increase representation, they didn’t have the time, energy, or lived experience to do justice to the lessons we were asking for. SEAAPIC aimed to provide accessible, grab-and-go lessons that would help them make classroom content more representative of Brookline’s 20% Asian student population; furthermore, this complemented legislative efforts to mandate the inclusion of Asian American and Pacific Islander history and culture in the state-wide curriculum.       

By the end of the fellowship, I had made progress, but so much less than I had envisioned because I realized the scope of my project was an incredible amount of work for one person to do. Upon having this realization, I started recruiting students and alumni from my hometown to be volunteers. When I started to form my team, I was really excited because I feel like I thrive in leadership roles; I love supporting others, facilitating a group, and thinking about the questions that come with leadership. 

SEAAPIC allowed me to explore how approaching this team as an opportunity for community organizing and relationship building could shift how we operated. My most formative leadership experience in high school had a very hierarchical, deadline-oriented structure, which was highly productive, but also limited our ability to be a community. I wanted to challenge the idea that productivity was the only marker of success, particularly when doing community work; so as I started building up the SEAAPIC team, I tried to place value on collective care, non-hierarchical leadership, and consensus. This shift in how I perceive leadership came in large part from studying women and gender studies and peace and justice studies at Pace. 

Over the course of this project, there have been 24 volunteers, all of whom have contributed their own expertise and insight foundational to creating our organization. In fact, when volunteers voiced a desire to shift our focus from educator-centered support to student-centered support in the spring of 2025, it triggered a year-long outreach and transition period. While SEAAPIC volunteers believed in our mission, the majority of them were high school students, and many felt they didn't have the background to write lesson plans. At the same time, they noticed there was a common pitfall in their own and their peers’ activism. So, we spent the summer and fall of 2025 doing outreach to understand what our team and BHS students wanted and needed that wasn’t already provided to them. What we heard was that they wanted to take action on a wide variety of issues they were passionate about, but they didn’t actually know how to do that. After a long journey (including countless meetings to come to consensus within our team), SEAAPIC has evolved into Students for Collective Liberation (SCL), which is focused on increasing access to the tools and community that Brookline student activists need to make change. 

While this transition was in the works, I started my senior year at Pace University, during which I was required to complete a thesis project. I had spent the past couple of years brainstorming potential thesis topics, but when it came time to choose, I was most passionate about researching how to build a curriculum that does the work SCL envisions. I had the chance to have more thorough conversations with students, educators, and alumni from Brookline about activism, which also helped shape the direction SCL took. By May 2026, I had written over 130 pages of “ACT 101: A Model of Popular Education for High School Activists in Brookline, MA” (which consisted of only a small part of the larger curriculum) and SCL was officially launched!

Since graduation, I have continued my research to build out this curriculum, but now I have the privilege of working alongside two BHS students, Sarah and Char! At the start of September, we started the third round of research in association with SCL’s Action Research Internship. The internship runs through the rest of the year and is a crash course in feminist research theory with the chance to apply that theory by conducting a round of research. While continuing this research is an aspect of SCL’s work, we’ve been working to provide regionally specific immigrant safety resources, offer workshops and teach-ins on practical tools like nonviolent action, and create a mentorship program to encourage knowledge-sharing between activists. 

During the Millennium Fellowship, I learned first-hand how community-centered work must be willing to change and adapt to community needs; listening closely can lead a project somewhere more responsive, sustainable, and powerful than its original design.

Article Written by : Lily Lockwood, Millennium Fellow Class of 2023

Pace University, New York