Our Work

Our summer CPAR projects (a.k.a. Imagining Summer Camp!) are geared towards children ages 7-11 (entering grades 3-5). CPAR is an approach to research in which youth take the lead in designing, and then doing their own research project. CPAR draws on popular education (i.e. education for and by "everyday" people) to use research as a way to take action towards justice. Our CPAR projects are multi-week projects that take place during the summer. Since CPAR is largely youth-driven, what we do differs each year. Some years, we may be researching what abstract ideas like social justice or power mean in order to understand how to take action in our communities. Other years, we might be taking action based on thing we've learned in the past. Each year, child research team participants are given the opportunity to build on the work done by young people in previous years. By doing this, we learn about what it means to build upon past research, organizing, and activism. Like our workshops, our CPAR projects use art, games, stories and movement to help us learn and organize for change in our communities.​

Our Intergenerational Identity Book club was born out of a collaboration between IMJF, Harvard University's Graduate Commons Program, and a Boston-based anti-racist education organization, Little Uprisings. It offers a multi-week opportunity for families to engage in conversations about social identity and social justice.

The Intergenerational Book Group is set up to serve grown ups with children ages 0-11. The book group consists of six weeks of asynchronous activities and weekly, synchronous sessions in which we use art, games, stories and movement to help us learn about a new topic each week.​ Current topics covered include: identity, race, ethnicity, culture, language, class and gender.

We offer workshops for children and intergenerational workshops for children and their grown ups. We can work with you to design a workshop for your context, but our past workshop topics have included:

• Power Rainbow workshops for longer-term community action projects (see Trainings below for more information)

• Identity workshops focusing on learning about specific social identities (e.g. race, gender)

• Connections between art and justice workshops (e.g. Poetry and Partnerships for Justice)

• Zine workshops to imagine what power in a just world could look like

We offer trainings for educators and other adults on how to use our Power Rainbow tool. The Power Rainbow is a pedagogical tool to support children in understanding how power works structurally. Structural understandings of power are important to understand systems of power like racism, sexism, and ageism. The Power Rainbow provides scaffolding to illuminate levels of these systems, and think about how we can take action to change these systems in the world around us.