10/12/2021 MASHPEE INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY COMMITTEE Minutes

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Mashpee IncCusion and Diversity Committee 16 Great Neck Road North -Mashpee, -Massachusetts 02649 In her second book she made a point to cover the entire state of New Hampshire. After the second book, she decided to narrow her focus and go deeper. She is working with one man who fled his African country, upon asking for asylum at the border in 2019, he was shackled and chained because he was seeking asylum. He was treated like a criminal wearing an orange jumpsuit and jailed for two years with intermittent threats of deportation. He would have been killed. He was a leader and administrator in his area, he is intelligent, and struggling with the fact he is treated like a criminal. Due to Covid, people like him were released from jails. In the first two years he was in a Southwest prison. They were about to deport him out of New York, but then he was moved to New Hampshire. Immigration was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union. He was put in a private home with an ankle monitor. It is not only physical but also emotionally taxing, life under detention. He is also a poet and an artist. Exhibits combine his art and her photographs. He has a young family and he remains anonymous for safety reasons. The military is brutal back in his homeland, and for this she cannot photograph his face. She is trying to build a photographic story around this person who cannot be shown. This work is done all in black and white, and she has never done that before. Ms. Stevenson elaborated that a teacher, Ms. Purdy, has been interested in the story of immigrants and refugees for a long time. She inspired Ms. Stevenson, who then ended up in Conversations that Matter zoom with Marie Blackburn, where she met Becky Field. Being here today, she can see a great culmination of all the departments and develop a mechanism on selecting a certain group of students. Ms. Field would come back in the spring, and the goal is to create this work and have exhibits, maybe a floating exhibit, to bring in the Community and the schools. There are many venues where this project can be on display. This will culminate at the end of the school year, then there will be an event at the Public Library. Ms. Field, along with the participating students, present for the public and hold a reception through the Library. It would be nice to continue this for years. It's an exciting project that we won't want to end this year. It ties into all the things we want to do in the Community and maybe we can produce a book for the Community. We have a school store, which is another place to demonstrate the exhibit. Ms. DeBoer is looking forward to Ms. Field working with a select group of students. Student photographers and writers would adopt a peer, then year two is building this beyond the school walls, modeling our project after what Ms. Field has done. 8