Making Learning Fun with Human-Centered Design Leadership and Curriculum building

Episode Transcript

Kelly Ryan Bailey  00:01

Hi everyone. Welcome to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. I am your host Kelly Ryan Bailey. Each week I chat with inspiring visionaries about the skills that make them successful, how they develop those skills, and their innovative approaches to improving skills based hiring and learning around the world. Come learn what skills help you live your best life. My guest today is Danielle De La Fuente. Danielle, thank you so much for joining us today.

Danielle De La Fuente  00:35

Thanks Kelly for having me. Delighted to be here.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  00:38

I want to give everyone a quick little background on Danielle. She has vast experience in peacebuilding and diplomatic efforts, stemming from her work at the US Department of Defense and multiple embassies. Her passion for achieving sustainable development led her to form the Amal Alliance. Amal is a non governmental nonprofit organization that provides displaced and disenfranchised children worldwide with social development programs that help cope with the invisible scars of trauma, and the learning fundamentals that guarantee them future opportunities to succeed. As a passionate advocate for children’s rights to education and to play, she specializes in social emotional learning. Bridging policy and practice, she sits on the advisory board of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center, chairs a G20-Y committee, and forms part of numerous international coalitions and UN Task Teams for early childhood development and inclusive education. Like her work, Danielle’s own background is rich in culture. She was born in San Diego to immigrant parents from Mexico and Iran, and is a multilingual. She’s also lived in four countries. She has her BA in International Relations from Boston University, and a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. I know Danielle, I want to even mention, that you are active with your rotary. You’re a kids yoga instructor and a mindfulness educator, which I just find so fascinating. Because those are just like all areas that I’m really interested in. Now, thank you so much for letting me gush on you, by the way. I would love to sort of jump in and just get a little bit more detail on your journey, what led you to really start Amal. You know, I love to hear the stories behind this.

Danielle De La Fuente  02:40

I’d love to share. As you mentioned, I’m sort of a jack of all trades. I am a kids yoga teacher, mindfulness educator and my previous incarnation, I was working for the US Department of Defense. I used to make a joke that I was eharmony for policy, because I would bring countries together. And we’d talk about energy security and water security, we do this over breakfast. But essentially, one of the things that I thought was really lacking in the conversation was, you know, people really didn’t have these social emotional skills, they didn’t have this emotional intelligence. So, at the end of the day we were trying to reach a resolution, but it was almost like people were speaking over each other. So I kept thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we taught these communication skills, all these things at a very early age, and we wouldn’t be sitting here years later in these conversations when the problem already existed. So I went back to school, and I did my Master’s in Peace and Conflict Studies. And I was really shocked to learn that, in essence, you know, just because you have the absence of war, and now, you know, there’s no conflict, everyone just kind of returns to daily life and pretends that there wasn’t this trauma and all these things that definitely not only affect the individual, but the community at large. So a lot of the programs really didn’t touch upon this, it was really humanitarian aid focused on the basic needs the food, the water, the shelter.  Which is very, very important. I’m not discounting it. But at the end of the day, we’re individuals and we also need to heal from overcoming these things. It was a moment in my life where my grandmother had passed away, and I was trying to find a little bit of purpose and meaning in my own life. I was doing my kids yoga teacher training in Greece, and I just happened to be very close to islands with a lot of children that had been displaced from war and conflict were living in these tented communities. And really it was shocking to see because you think Greece and you think this beautiful area and vacation, and you don’t imagine just these horrifically impoverished areas with children that are destitute and don’t really have any access to education or any opportunities. And so I just chatted with the kids and ask them tell me about your journey. Tell me how you got here. Tell me what you feel is missing. And a lot of them were missing those socialization aspects that you would get in school. Obviously, going to school itself. And so I just started combining two and two together and thought, I’m listening to what they need. You know, in the States we’re using mindfulness and kids yoga to kind of do a more holistic approach to education. And I kept thinking if it’s working so well here, why wouldn’t it work in a conflict area? And that’s how it kind of began and then it took a life of its own.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  06:13

That is just so fascinating that you saw something, you know, from this experience that again, seemingly to like unrelated situations in your life, but then all of a sudden, you realized, wow, when I hear this, it really makes me think this could be an amazing solution. I also really love the policy view that you have, this started with adults, and you know, handling a situation and trying to come to a resolution. Because I often say that. I’ve been having these conversations a lot lately, too. If we started back at the beginning, how easy or easier, at least in our mind would it be, because we’d already know the foundations for understanding empathy towards what other people’s situation would be. And, you know, how to communicate. Just those basics on SEL, that could really make such a huge difference. But you know, like you said, you see these individuals that are having this trauma, you had some yourself, and it affects you, and you can’t just push it aside. There’s only so long you can push it aside. It’s going to rear up in different ways. And if it’s reverberated through a community, I can only imagine,

Danielle De La Fuente  07:32

Exactly. I think you just said something really key about the foundation. How important are these skills? Forget about living in a warzone or surviving conflict. I mean, even just in everyday life, there’s so many children that are being bullied now in school, or you know, just someone that’s maybe of a different ethnicity, or of a different color, or race. You need to really have these basis to be very accepting, and just put yourself in other people’s shoes and just remove judgment, it really makes for a much better society at large. But unfortunately, it took a pandemic to these issues to a surface saying hey, there’s a lot going on, that we’re not addressing in schools and how children learn. If we can cement the right foundation, it’s a game changer for the future.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  08:26

I wholeheartedly agree. I even think back to my own self in school. And I didn’t really think about that all that much until I had my own children in a school environment. But I will share with you all that I was terribly bullied in school for years, and would come home crying almost every day throughout elementary school, through middle school, and sometimes even in high school. It was awful. And I think back and I’m like, man, if I just had the ability is to handle that in a different way. How different would my life have been?

Danielle De La Fuente  09:07

When I was a kid, I was very, very thin, and I had big ears. So I had the fortune of being called Dumbo on occasion. But, I grew into my ears, a benefit of weight gain. But, you know, I agree. And I was very fortunate to have a mother that was incredibly compassionate and empathetic, and taught me to build confidence and resilience and just kind of push these things to the side, but not everyone has that same fortune. Especially a lot of the children that we deal with their unaccompanied minors. You know, their parents wanted them to have a better life. So they put them on a boat, knowing that the land that they were on was just so much more dangerous. And most of these children are really struggling because, you know, they’re wandering around life on their own. Imagine as an adult, it’s hard enough but maybe being an 11 or 10 year old child. And then add to that all sorts of security risks. Because if you’re sitting in a refugee camp or any sort of settlement, and you have absolutely nothing to do, boredom is really just leads to all sorts of other dangers. Now you’re susceptible to being, you know, recruited by a terrorist organization, or by entering a life of crime or being abducted, you know, human traffic. There’s so many security risks. One of the things that we really try to do also is mitigate the security risks by embracing the children to have a venue to have a safe space where they can come and they can express themselves. And so that’s also one element that’s really important to us, and not just the learning and the skills, but providing them this element of protection, and just a space that they can come and be, almost like a home like environment.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  10:56

Mm hmm. No, that sounds so nice. I’d love to hear a little bit more about how this all started with Amal, and maybe some of the areas that you’re actually operating in and sort of what that looks like, so that we can picture it for ourselves.

Danielle De La Fuente  11:16

Yeah, definitely. I’ll give you a pre-COVID view and then a post-COVID view. Prior to COVID we were working in Greece, Lebanon, and Turkey. And we work with women from the community as well, especially organizations on the ground, so small organizations that may not have tremendous amount of funding for these fancy curriculums and big trainings. We empower them, we train their teachers, women from the camps to be the teachers, provide them the curriculum, the materials. Then they in turn, impart what we call a rainbow of education. So it’s a rainbow, because imagine it’s for children. So you have red being emotions and green being compassion, blue being empathy. And so the idea is that as children go through the different colors of the rainbow, they acquire those foundational interpersonal and social emotional skills. It’s a six month program. It’s not a one stop shop. It really works best when it’s complemented with other programs. So if there’s like a really dynamic literacy and numeracy program that UNICEF is doing or something of that sort. But really just to help children heal, and then put them on the track to their most basic foundational education. And so, when COVID has obviously classes stopped. We were working inside of community centers, we really wanted to figure out how we could continue our work. But you know, this isn’t your typical setting. It’s not like you’re sitting in California or New York, and your child has access to Zoom. In this case, there’s very limited devices to begin with. And then even if there are devices, most likely you don’t have an internet connection. So we were trying to figure out what could we possibly do, and it was very clear that this massive problem was going to require a very equally comprehensive response. So we spearheaded an emergency response COVID Consortium, and brought together lots of really wonderful organizations from Salzburg Global Seminar to Kuranga, to Qatar Foundation International and Learning in Times of Crisis. And essentially, we all built on each other’s expertise and skills, and produced what we named We Are In This Together. And it was a podcast series interestingly enough. And this sort of happened naturally, dynamically. We were trying to figure out what could we do? And, you know, most parents had a phone. And so we thought okay, well, if you’re trapped in a location with no sanitation, no possibility of social distancing, and no materials. Well, at least you could get like a voice note with some instructions or ideas of different coping mechanisms that you could do with your children. And so it was six episode series. We touched on hygiene, we touched on all sorts of wonderful themes. And it ended up reaching about 160,000 users within a month, and these are users without internet. So that was absolutely incredible.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  14:30

That is amazing. I just can’t even…that’s just a huge amount of people. And with those constraints for this group to come together in that short period of time and be able to make that much of a difference.

Danielle De La Fuente  14:44

I think the reason we were able to get it out there so quickly was, one was timeliness. So  the pandemic started in March, we we got it out. We translated it in foreign languages, and it was out for distribution by very early April. And at the time, I think a lot of the very large NGOs were still trying to figure out what they were going to even do. So here we had something, maybe it wasn’t the best solution, but it was a solution. And we distributed it and said hey, everyone use it. We just want everyone that we can reach. So about 543 organizations ended up adopting it. Admittedly, it was very difficult to track. So we were able to track okay, well, this organization used it, but we just wanted to get it out there. And that sort of gave life to something else. So at that time, was when the UN especially UNHCR was really trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of these out of school children, because now it’s, you know, an emergency within an emergency. So it’s just compounded and, you know, what do we do? They had received our podcast and we were invited to apply to this COVID-19 challenge to present solutions that could basically create an education in emergency prototype. We went from 80, to top 16, to top 10. And then finally, we made it into the finalists. And we were so excited. So we were really, really blessed to be able to work with UNHCR and IDEO to build out this prototype. We worked with a tech partner in Dubai, Ustad Mobile, and essentially created the same idea as the podcast, but now made it more dynamic with a digital workbook and a learning management system that worked offline. And so it was piloted in Bangladesh, and just concluded in December,

Kelly Ryan Bailey  16:50

That is so exciting. How was everyone receiving it?

Danielle De La Fuente  16:56

So I’m not a big crier, but I was in a meeting a couple days ago, and it was our end of the project meeting. And just hearing all of the feedback and seeing all the pictures, I was literally in tears. I mean, it was probably one of our most successful programs thus far. The kids all kept saying that they wish they had this earlier on in the pandemic. 97% of the parents noted that the change in mood and temperament in their children was very visible. We had a 16.5% increase in development of social and emotional competencies. I mean, that’s huge. It was a 10 week pilot. So seeing that it was so successful in such a short period, really makes me very hopeful that if this were to be properly extended over the course of the year, we could see much more long term.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  17:58

So what are the next plans for it?

Danielle De La Fuente  18:02

We’re writing the report. So in the coming week, we’ll have all the jiffy facts and figures to present. And our goal is then to scale it. So the incubator, which basically put on this challenge is called Humanitarian Education Accelerator. And it’s backed by a lot of really great people, like for everyone from USAID to DFID to Lego to Porticus. So we’ll be pitching them end of the month, to see obviously, if they liked our solution, and then also what the scale journey would look like, and where. So I know that they have some priority areas, so those would probably align. But really the need is everywhere now. I mean, you have out of school children bascially everyhwere.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  18:49

That’s what I was gonna say. I was like, is this really just only for, you know, children that are in trauma crisis zones? Because when you’re describing it, I just think there’s so many…You think about the internet barren places, even just in the massive US, because there’s just so many spots that don’t have it, but across the world, you know?

Danielle De La Fuente  19:15

I couldn’t agree more. Really, the way it was designed is to help children transition back into the classroom. So it’s a hybrid. So there is in person instruction, but in very small groups, and we were really, really happy that there were zero infections, none of the children, none of the teachers, no one in the community had any sort of COVID exposure throughout. Because we were really worried during the pilot, is this going to be something that’s going to happen? So, we were able to prove that in these dynamic small groups and with the activities that we were proposing, everything was contained, and it helps the children go back into school. Because it’s all based on social emotional learning. You know, we’re not teaching math, we’re not teaching science, we’re really helping the children overcome what they’re living at this point, and then be ready to transition back into the classroom. So we’re even in conversations now with organizations in Chicago, like you said, even in our backyard. Areas that might not have as much connectivity to their schools. So, we hope that some governments will work with us to adopt the model, as the kids kind of go back into the classroom, but it’s really going to be, I think, a case by case you know, let’s see, which governments are a little bit more inclined to explore into the unknown. Since social emotional learning is still a bit not mainstream.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  20:49

I feel like I agree with you. Last year was just this moment where it kind of got it into the spotlight. You know, me personally, I didn’t have the name to it until I started hearing about it last year. But it was like what I referred to as growth mindset. And it’s what I’ve focused on with my children. Basically, within the first two years of finding out my daughter had issues learning at school. And it has been a life changer. But I can say that even in what I would refer to as a non-crisis zone, we’re all experiencing trauma in our own respects. Even my own children, you know, we’ve been having trouble. My oldest daughter who’s 12, I’m picturing, even for someone like her, she is just really struggling with not being in the school environment. And we’re so fortunate to have a lot of virtual capabilities, of course, but she’s still emotionally and mentally struggling.

Danielle De La Fuente  21:51

One of the things that I really enjoyed watching in this pilot, so the way we broke it out, is we took the five main social emotional competencies that CASEL names, and we kind of just, brought in them.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  22:06

So for those who don’t know them, do you mind saying…

Danielle De La Fuente  22:10

Yeah, so you have self awareness, and you have self management, you have social awareness, you have relationship building, and of course, now the last one escapes me. Oh, my goodness, it’ll come to me.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  22:25

You know what, when I share this, I have a beautiful image that I like to share with it. So I’ll share that.

22:32

Okay, perfect. Now, of course, it’s gonna drive me crazy in the last one.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  22:36

You’ll think of it while were chatting.

Danielle De La Fuente  22:39

But essentially, for instance, let’s look at just self awareness. I think right now, even just being able to name your emotion is something that a lot of people are unfamiliar with. Because a lot of people know the common emotions, like I’m happy or I’m sad. But there’s so many other emotions. And just being able to say okay, I feel exhausted, or I’m actually really irritated. And that’s okay. Naming it, and then figuring out different ways that you can manage that, I think has been a key to the children. And the way we did it was every week they would take their emotional temperature. There was this really cute thermometer, then they would see where they landed on the scale. And then once they were in that emotional temperature, then they would identify what they were feeling. And just having that opportunity to express it, I think is also important. Because, you know, if a child is feeling scared, and they don’t want to mention it, but then maybe somebody else is feeling that same way. It builds a bond.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  23:50

Yep. Because there’s something about understanding that you’re not alone that changes it. It’s like that internal, like everything just piles up inside when you think you’re the crazy one, you know, people don’t feel this way.

Danielle De La Fuente  24:09

Exactly. So it’s been something really beautiful to watch. So I feel like we’re going to be in this hybrid mode for a while. So that’s where we’re going. Everything that was built into this prototype was based on our original rainbow curriculum. So now we have the best of both worlds. And then when in person instruction is ready, I think the world is now more accepting of, hey, it’s time to look at the whole person, not just different segments of it.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  24:43

Yes, I absolutely love that. So, I’m just curious how you kind of came up with this concept of the rainbow?

Danielle De La Fuente  24:56

It’s actually the simplest thing. So, when I realized that there was definitely some intersection between what I was seeing at a policy level, and then working with children, I kept thinking. There wasn’t a lot of research at the time that linked early childhood with peace, but was sort of an obvious in my book. I mean, I wasn’t an expert in all things, but I noticed that, you know, every organization worked in a particular silo. So it was like, they were just doing reading, or they were just doing dance, or they were just doing, you know, something else. And I kept thinking, Well, why is no one working together? This is the humanitarian world, after all. Shouldn’t we all be getting along and working together? It just made more sense to me, because you know, as a child, you don’t learn in these different compartments. Like, oh okay well, from three to five we’re going to do this. So I thought, why aren’t we all working together to blend it and this blended approach would just seem more natural and slow. So I contacted leaders and kids yoga, or leaders and mindfulness, and leaders and dance and said, hey, you’re really good at dance. Like, I know nothing about dance therapy. But what if we were to add it into what we’re already doing with yoga, what we’re already doing with mindfulness? And so essentially, the rainbow was built from everyone’s input all these amazing experts, all these amazing organizations that basically contributed their expertise. So when I was trying to figure out what we were going to call it, there was this intern with us, and she was like, well, it’s really like a melange. I’m like, yeah, and then somehow it came up, it was like a rainbow, like an assortment. And I’m like, yes, it’s a rainbow. So that’s really how it came about. It was just trying to give everyone the appreciation and thanks that they deserved. And that’s how it got named,

Kelly Ryan Bailey  27:01

Wow. Once you create this combined blended approach, if you will, do you still…how long has Amal been around by the way? I should have asked that at the beginning.

Danielle De La Fuente  27:15

 We just turned three.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  27:16

Oh, my gosh. That’s really exciting. Congratulations. So do you guys still have a group of various people that you rely on to sort of…

Danielle De La Fuente  27:28

Yeah. So essentially when the rainbow curriculum was built, I mean, this thing is humongous. It’s about 400 pages worth of lesson plans. And so it was written in a way that, if you didn’t have any background in anything that I just mentioned, if you could read, you could teach it. But the most important part was really the training, because, you know, you can’t teach empathy, if you don’t understand what it is. And also, there’s a very fine line of doing good and doing harm. So we would really just train them as to why we were teaching this, what’s the correct manner, how to work with children that survived trauma, etc. And then they had all the content basically, already laid out. And so as it evolved, because we get lots of feedback from the teachers and the kids, we’ve adapted, right? So, in Lebanon for instance, dance was not, surprisingly, as successful as it was in Greece. Which was kind of ironic, because we thought it was going to be a really exciting addition. But yet, the mindfulness was booming. And so we tweaked it, to make it more adaptable to this community. Whereas, in Turkey they wanted a little bit more of teamwork and goal setting and decision making. So then we tweaked a little bit more and added more games that, you know, did that. So it’s really evolved a lot. And I think the reason that it’s been very easy to apply is because it’s contextualized and localized to whichever community that is using it. And so, yeah, we were actually really fortunate. I have to brag. In December of 2019, we were named as the most promising holistic practice at the inaugural Global Refugee Forum. So that was like a huge honor. And then of course the world stopped three months later, but…

Kelly Ryan Bailey  29:33

Right, well, you got that in there first. Just to make sure that I understood that correctly. So you take this whole huge rainbow curriculum, and you’ll tweak it, depending on the location or the group that you’re working with.

Danielle De La Fuente  30:07

Yes. So the pilot, by the way, the one that we produced in COVID, it’s called Colors of Kindness. It was renamed because even though it’s inspired from the rainbow, it’s really just its own. Because the rainbow curriculum does do reading and writing and all sorts of other things, whereas this was specifically social emotional learning. And we tried to continue with the whole idea of colors.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  30:33

No, I think it’s, I think it’s great. And I think so appropriate for right now too. And actually, it’s funny, because you just reminded me too, the temperature taking of your emotions and sort of these colors. My son is in virtual kindergarten, and he does that. At the beginning of each day, they talk are you in the green zone, are you in the red zone. I love the way that she describes it. The red zone isn’t only anger, it’s like, if you’re really excited, if you’re really frustrated, if you’re really tired. There’s, there’s multiple things that can make you sort of that…

Danielle De La Fuente  31:09

I love that.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  31:12

Our emotions are just so complex, that’s the thing. If you just say, I’m mad, it’s so hard to determine. You feel like, GRRR. But if it’s not madness, you tend to deflect it on to whatever the thing is. And you’re not realizing that actually, it’s not that at all, it’s just that you’re tired.

Danielle De La Fuente  31:37

That’s exactly what I was gonna say. Sometimes you think you’re feeling one thing, but when you take a little time to reflect and you’re like oh, actually no, it’s an underlying emotion, and this is just how I’m perceiving it.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  31:49

Yeah. I’m the worst person if I’m hangry. I’m really one of those people. Most of the time, I’m like oh, hold on a second, I’m just really hungry, we’re gonna stop, I’m going to go eat.

Danielle De La Fuente  32:02

I’m one of those people too.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  32:07

I really just love everything you’re doing. So if there’s other organizations that end up listening in, and they’re interested in working with you all, or somehow collaborating with you all, I’m trying to think of the various ways. Because, immediately when I’m hearing this I’m thinking, oh wow, what if someone else wants to take your colors of kindness and bring it into another community? Or somehow wants to collaborate with you, or any of the other ones. Because I think there’s a lot of options here. Do they just contact Amal? Or do you have various options of the way that you work with organizations?

Danielle De La Fuente  32:45

Yeah. I feel like this past year has been so different. So we’re open to anything and everything now. You know, I feel like please just contact us. Our goal is to reach as many kids as possible and like I said, the need is there, everywhere. Pretty much you name a location, a community, a country, it’s there. So currently, our content for colors of kindness exists in English, Bangla and in Rohinga. It exists in this in these formats, and can be very easily translated. So I’m happy to work with anyone really that wants to adopt that, or a rainbow of education. Because I do think moving forward, we’re going to be in this limbo a little bit more to get the children to catch up before we can really get into the actual learning aspects of going back science and history, etc.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  33:45

Yeah. The interesting thing, I think about with this is, of course, you’ve created this for children, but I also wonder, there’s so many organizations out there right now that are thinking of this mindset and culture shift in the workplace. And like you said, you saw it initially in your policy work with adults. So, I feel like this year makes us all think outside of the box, right? Or this past year. I’m forgetting that we’re already in a new year. But it’s all making us think outside of the box. So I even wonder if what you’ve created could be a collaboration with an organization that may be trying to put together sort of a various, I’m thinking modules in my mind for workplace training? I kind of wish we would start our meeting sometimes with like, okay, temperature check of emotions in the room people. Let’s all take in a deep breath, right? Because it really changes how you approach whatever the next thing that you’re doing, if you all just sort of have that moment.

Danielle De La Fuente  34:55

And it sets the tone, really? Yes, we actually just had a board meeting last week, and we’re discussing that because I couldn’t agree more with you. I mean, even though we designed it for kids, and yes, we’re playing and drawing and singing and dancing, I mean, it’s the exact same thing that can be taught to adults. And hey, adults like to play and dance. But it could very, very easily be used for adults in any even Corporation, and even in the private sector, not even just an organization. But you know, I don’t like to stretch ourselves too thin. I’m very cognizant of the fact that we do early education, and we do psychosocial support and social emotional learning well with kids, and we do really well. I don’t want to just kind of spread ourselves too thin and then do it sort of okay, and then sort of okay here.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  35:50

That makes sense.

Danielle De La Fuente  35:51

But I do think that, given our expertise, if any corporation or anything wants us to consult and give them tips of how we’ve done it, and how they can structure it. I mean,  these are just universally applicable concepts. I mean, it’s really not that difficult. And if we can do it in a conflict area in Bangladesh virtually, it can be done pretty much anywhere. So, yeah, we’re happy to support and help where we’re needed.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  36:22

That’s wonderful. Well, that’s really good to know. And I’m about to let everyone know where to find all the information. But, you know, since we’re coming to the end of our time here, Danielle, I’d love to give you that last moment to sort of open endedly, leave us with your parting thoughts.

Danielle De La Fuente  36:39

Oh, my parting thoughts. Okay, well, because we’re talking about skills baby. The COVID pandemic obviously had so many challenges. We have to make note of that. But I also think it was a real opportunity to reimagine how we learn, and how learning can take place anywhere at any time. And that includes all ages. So from your earliest years, until your late age, I mean, I’m always learning, I’m always hopefully learning new things. So I think if we can embrace that, and see that as a real opportunity and say, okay well, our education systems were forged in the 18th century, and really need to revamp. You know, what are our children really learning? Where do we want to be in four years? You know, what do we want to see in our next generation? I think it’s really peak time for us to make those policy changes, to advocate, to really be ambassadors for this opportunity. So I welcome everyone to advocate with us. And hopefully we can make a more promising tomorrow, because I think the time is right.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  37:56

Wow. So well said I love it. Well, thank you so much again, Danielle, for joining. I’m just excited from here on out, continue conversations and figure out ways to collaborate because I’m already thinking of like areas where people might be, you know, wanting to work with what you guys have built. So, I’m going to keep all that in mind. But for anyone else who’s also thinking the same thing, you can find the Amal Alliance at amalalliance.org. They are also available on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And Danielle is available on LinkedIn. And she is also on Instagram at dani_delafuente. So thank you all for listening in to Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. If you enjoyed this podcast, please definitely subscribe. We are on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. I can’t even think anymore honestly. The New Year’s got me all mixed up. And then of course available on all the same socials you see here along with me at Kelly Ryan Bailey. Danielle, thank you again.

Danielle De La Fuente  39:09

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Kelly Ryan Bailey  39:12

All right. Have a great day, everybody.