Building relationships amongst participants, parents, instructors, mentors and members of the community is important to the leadership of BYiS. To create lasting relationships through engaging and memorable STEM activities, we enlist the help of various Queen’s University faculties and departments to deliver impactful and relevant K-12 STEM learning experiences to Black youth, especially during our summer camps.
The Queen’s University Faculty of Education Library provides the BYiS team with access to more teaching and learning resources and helps us to teach Black youth how to use the library system to prepare them for an academic future at Queen’s University.
We also engage members of the local community who offer education programs for K-12 youth. For example, the staff at the Museum of Health Care, Kingston, can always be depended on to offer interactive and engaging learning experiences for K-12 Black youth throughout the year.
Our main community partner in the Greater Toronto Area is the Durham Catholic District School Board (2022 to present) who provides us with an avenue to engage Black and racialized youth enrolled in elementary and high Schools across their school district. We predominantly engage students in grades 7 to 10 during STEM summer camps and to a lesser extent through virtual programming. In the summer of 2022, we partnered with Ladder 2 Rise - an organization that seeks to remove roadblocks faced by underrepresented youth, including those in state care, to ensure a seamless pathway to achieving educational and life goals.
Important to us is the guidance received from the Indigenous Futures in Engineering (InEng) Unit within Smith Engineering on best practices to build communities especially in the context of a learning environment. InEng has also helped us to engage parents in STEM, by teaching Black youth rocketry during summer camps, which brought together over one hundred family members at the launch site. This was an activity that participants and parents absolutely loved!