Activating Heritage 2023 – March 6

VOLUNTEERISM AS ACTIVISM

Panelists:

Jill Glenn is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Illinois. She spent seventeen years of her career working with Kids Above All, a nonprofit child welfare agency. She is known as a tireless advocate for underserved populations and youth living in out-of-home placements. As the Executive Director of Community Partnerships at The Chicago School for the last sixteen years, Jill continues to spend much of her time building community relationships. Her energy and enthusiasm for building community partnerships comes from her first-hand understanding of how The Chicago School can impact, as well as benefit, from connecting with the community. She lives out her commitment to service having spent several years volunteering in the community as a basketball coach, tutor/mentor, and summer camp counselor. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Kids Rank, an organization that provides support to children of military families. In addition, she spent fifteen years serving as a weekly volunteer at the Sue Duncan Children’s Center, tutoring and mentoring youth from Chicago’s south side. She currently co-leads a weekly teen boys’ workout group at Oakley Square Apartments on the west side. She received a Master of Arts Degree in Social Work from Aurora University. ​​

Khitam Masoud is a first-generation Palestinian immigrant with a unique background in nonprofit management and philanthropy. As the Executive Director at MALA: Muslim American Leadership Alliance, she is working to build a nation-wide community to amplify the legacy and impact of Muslim American cultural heritage and intersectional identity. 

For more than 10 years, she has been on a mission to build compassionate networks of support through mentorship for women and other marginalized communities in the city of Chicago.  Khit’s passion for philanthropy and community building has inspired her to a lifetime of service.  In 2016, she founded her own nonprofit, Blessons for Women, a nonprofit dedicated to providing scholarships towards skilled trades and resources for women. Khitam’s mission has always been to empower others and educate her community in volunteerism.

Youngwoon Han is Senior Organizing Manager at HANA Center. As a community organizer, he helps build power among Korean and Asian American communities and immigrants of color through civic engagement, policy advocacy, and racial and social justice education and training. He previously worked at National Korean American Service and Education Consortium as a policy and organizing coordinator and is a licensed social worker. HANA means one in Korean and he believes that we will be stronger as one.

Moderator: Sarah Cameron – Chicago Cultural Alliance

Activating Heritage 2023 – March 6

CONNECTING YOUR CULTURAL CONTENT WITH CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Panelists:

Katia Marzolf Borione is a born and raised Chicago kid who is a first generation American of Viking descent. Katia is a K-12 CPS educated student, a former ballerina, and a Butler University graduate with a B.A. in Dance Education & Pedagogy.

Katia began her Dance Teaching Artist career with the Chicago Park District in 1996 and after leaving the Parks in 2002 she taught dance with the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago, the Wilmette Park District, Dancercise Kids of Fun Kids, Inc., and then spent 14 years at Alphonsus Academy & Center for the Arts Elementary School. There she pioneered and developed the Dance Arts Integration program and curriculum as the Dance Teaching Artist-in-Residence and as then supported bringing Arts into the classroom as the Director of Arts, Culture & Integration. From 2017-2020 Katia worked with Ensemble Espanol Spanish Dance Theater, in Residence at Northeastern Illinois University, as their Education and Outreach Director before joining Communities In Schools of Chicago in May 2020.

CIS of Chicago has provided Katia the opportunity to fully achieve her personal mission to bring the Arts to as many CPS students as possible. As a CPS Arts Magnet school student, she experienced first-hand how the arts impacted her and her classmates. As a Teaching Artist she was able to provide a safe and creative space for self-expression and student voice to her many students. Katia is proud to call CIS of Chicago her professional family and looks forward to continuing being #AllinforKids.

Ahmad Bracey is the Manager of Learning School and Youth Communities Programming for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). Ahmad is a native of Chicago’s Bronzeville community. He received his B.A. from Chicago State University in 2010 majoring in Biology and Philosophy, with a research focus on medical access in African American communities.

In addition to managing a suite of programs in the MCA’s learning department he teaches photography with Early Exposures.

Ahmad had specialized in documenting, through photographs and essays,  elements of Chicago life, including urban framing, pedicabbing, and landmark restoration.

Briana Thomas is the Programs Associate at the Abrahamic Center for Cultural Education (a core member of the Chicago Cultural Alliance). She wears many hats including developing exhibition content, facilitating community programs (children and adults), liaising with visitor artists, and other responsibilities. Her previous experience in the nonprofit space includes her tenure as the Financial Empowerment Coordinator at Sharing Life Center, cultural and linguistic education, as well as engaging with the public at the Dallas Arboretum. Her past professional experience has remained rooted in marginalized communities. It is their needs, discourse, and histories that she has routinely been tasked with protecting and showcasing in the face of poor infrastructure, and willing ignorance. Creating safe spaces is an ancestral practice she has inherited.

Moderator: Cairo Dye – Chicago Architecture Center

Activating Heritage 2023 – March 6

START YOUR OWN ORAL HISTORY PROJECTS

Panelists:
Liliana Macias is a DACAmented queer Mexican cultural worker, scholar, and educator raised in Chicago. As a scholar she is currently a PhD student in History at UIC, with a BA in Latinx and Latin American Studies with a minor in Women, Gender and Sexuality, and a master’s in Latin American Studies. Her research interest is in gender and sexuality with a focus on queer latinidades of Chicago. As a cultural worker, she has worked in museum education, curation and public engagement while also engaging in contract work to structurally support local cultural institutions.  As an educator she lectured in the women, gender, and sexuality department at Northeastern Illinois university, led workshops on oral histories and the archives with various K-12 youth, and shared her knowledge of queer Latinx cultural histories of Chicago for various audiences. In 2020, Liliana published her master’s thesis “Transformismo: A Spatial, Cultural, and Racial Intervention in Chicago’s Queer and Latinx Communities” in the anthology Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces, and Otherness. When not enveloped in her work Liliana enjoys writing poems and has been working on a collection of short stories based on her

Abdul Basheer is a current graduate student in the Department of History at UIC. His research interests include Muslim American history, Islam in the West, Islamic intellectual history, modern U.S. religious history, and transnationalism related to religious, cultural, and intellectual exchange. He has worked on projects such as “Dis/Placements: A People’s History of Uptown,” a collaborative digital public history project which traces the history of the northside neighborhood intentionally shaped by multiple forms of displacement, urban renewal, and active resistance, as well as “American Medina: Stories of Muslim Chicago,” an oral history exhibition at the Chicago History Museum.

Moderator: Mónica Félix

Activating Heritage 2023 – March 6

LOW COST SOLUTIONS FOR COLLECTIONS
Panelists:
Andrea Stamm is the Chair of Collections and Research at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago. In this role, she documents the donation process of objects, documents, photographs, etc., then determines the best method of permanently storing them using best practices for their preservation, including photographing the object, and cataloging it in our online database. She has given lectures on the Chinese participation in the two Chicago World Fairs, lessons learned from the 2008 CAMOC fire, as well as on Chinese jade.
Andrea has Master’s degrees in library science as well as in the French language. Before coming to the Museum in 2004, she worked as a librarian in several university libraries, retiring from Northwestern University in 2013.

Julie Wroblewski is the Director of Collections at the Chicago History Museum, with over 10 years of library and archives experience. In addition to an archival certification from the Academy of Certified Archives and is also certified as a Digital Archivist by the Society of American Archivists. She received her Master of Library and Information Science from Dominican University and a Master of Arts in Digital Humanities from Loyola University. Her professional experience includes work with both archival and rare book collections at Benedictine University, the Chicago Academy of Sciences and its Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society.

Sara Chapman has been executive director of Media Burn since 2009, and has been an integral part of the organization since its founding in 2003. You can catch her online at Media Burn’s biweekly Virtual Talks with Video Activists series on Thursdays. A scholar of early video and television, her article “Guerrilla Television in the Digital Archive” was published in the Journal of Film and Video. She was the producer of the feature-length experimental film, Ghosts in the Machine, which toured internationally. She’s also an avid swimmer and former co-chair of her Masters swim team, the Chicago Smelts.

Emma Saito Lincoln (she/her) is the Legacy Center Director for the Japanese American Service Committee in Chicago, Illinois. She manages the JASC Legacy Center’s library and archives, which document the history of the Japanese American community in Chicago and the Midwest. Ms. Lincoln completed her graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a Master of Science in Information Studies and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Preservation Administration. She has fifteen years of experience in libraries and archives of all sizes, scaling solutions up or down to fit the available budget, staffing, and infrastructure. Her work at the JASC Legacy Center combines her passion for libraries and archives with her personal identity as a mixed-race Japanese American.

Moderator: Andrew Leith