Dozens of students and community members gathered Friday at Haskell Indian Nations University for National TRIO Day.
National TRIO Day, generally celebrated annually on the fourth Saturday in February, commemorates the achievements of the seven federal programs that assist students in overcoming the obstacles they face as the first in their families to attend and graduate from college.
TRIO currently serves more than 850,000 students with 3,100 programs nationwide and 6 million alumni.
Haskell’s TRIO director, Yosh Wagoner, Diné and Chickasaw, highlighted the program’s role in empowering students facing barriers to higher education.
“TRIO is a safeguard, a guide, and a bridge to success,” she said, underscoring the importance of nurturing both students’ academic and cultural heritage. “Today we stand united in support of our community as it is committed to equality, opportunity and transformation.”
Keynote speaker Ferial Pearson is a queer, Muslim immigrant woman from Kenya, a teacher and a first-generation college graduate. She warned the audience that her story starts with tragedy but gets better, like the movie “Up.”
In 2012, the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, claimed the life of a 6-year-old whose innocence, curiosity, and love for life struck a close resemblance to Pearson’s own daughter of the same age.
The conversations Pearson had with her young children after the mass shooting, a lesson from Arun Gandhi on collective responsibility, and the realization that although the world was scary, she could affect what happens in her own classroom planted seeds that would grow into the Secret Kindness Agents.
Together with her students, they pledged to carry out anonymous acts of kindness. Each student adopted a “secret agent” code name, and they brainstormed 21 acts — one for each member of the group. The project turned into a weekly tradition with a ceremony for selecting acts of kindness to be performed anonymously.
The project had positive impacts that rippled through their community, changed her students’ lives and grew into a global movement.
Secret Kindness Agent chapters have formed across the world in diverse communities, which provided Pearson the opportunity to study the impacts of her methods for her dissertation.
Pearson found that intentional, anonymous acts of kindness and reflecting on the experience of performing those acts provides the brain with beneficial endorphins. The effects on individuals and communities were consistent, with improved well-being, behavior, academic performance, empathy, and increased pride and ownership in one’s community.
To learn more about the Secret Kindness Agents project, check out Pearson’s TedX presentation, the mini-documentary on the project, the book written collaboratively by Pearson and her students and the educator’s guide to the project.
If our local journalism matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Molly Adams (she/her), photojournalist and news operations coordinator for The Lawrence Times, can be reached at molly@lawrencekstimes.com. Check out more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
Latest Lawrence news:
Nathan Kramer / Lawrence Times
August Rudisell/Lawrence Times
