Strong Community
May 1, 2024
This article was initially published in The Crest: Spring 2024 Edition by Fr. Nate Bostian, Stemmons Family Senior Chaplain.
At The Episcopal School of Dallas, our community is the nest where our Eagles discover their wings and learn to soar. When our founder, The Reverend Canon Stephen B. Swann, gathered the first teachers and students around a flickering campfire in 1974, they sparked a culture of purpose and belonging that still ignites lives of purpose to this day. Though ESD has grown from a handful of chicks into almost 1,200 Eagles circling Stoffel Commons in 2023, the same spirit of community burns bright.
Our community is bound together by three interconnected strands of who, why, and how. Who we are includes not only our students and families, but also our alumni, faculty, and staff. Our why is our bold mission to ignite lives of purpose as we develop educated consciences. And how we connect our who to our why is found in our EPISCOPAL virtues of Empathy, Peacemaking, Integrity, Service, Creativity, Openness, Perseverance, Appreciation, and Love. These virtues are operationalized in a dynamic curriculum of purpose that turns these aspirations into the skills and dispositions, resources, and relationships necessary for our community to soar.
So, this year we will look at how we can take our amazing community and optimize it to further live into our mission of purpose and belonging. In particular, we will see if there are ways to build our “nest” deeper and broader so that every Eagle can find their unique place in a community that is fulfilling, kind, trustworthy, accessible, and encouraging. We will optimize our nest for fulfillment in deeply joyful experiences beyond merely having fun. We will optimize for kindness by assuring the safety and well-being of students at the margins of our community. We will optimize for trust by restoring connection among groups that may feel alienated from one another. We will optimize for accessibility by eliminating unnecessary barriers to full participation in the community. And we will optimize for encouragement by finding new ways to inspire every Eagle to strive to become their best self.
There are four phases to optimizing our nest to help ESD become the best version of itself. In the first phase, we will collect data on what we are already doing to build and maintain the strong community we have. We will find out which policies, practices, and programs currently build our community, and what we do that is experienced as unifying ESD, or a subset of ESD. We will also uncover any social, cultural, financial, scheduling, or communications barriers to unity, as we start thinking about policies, practices, and programs that should or could unify us further.
- Data collection
- Recommendations
- Plan to strengthen and/or create community programs (Spring 2024 and beyond)
- Implement community programs (Fall 2024 and beyond)
In the second phase, we will make recommendations about current programs that could be easily strengthened to contribute immediately to community building, as well as any barriers to community participation that could be easily mitigated or overcome. We will also begin to imagine new policies, practices, and programs that could increase fulfillment, kindness, trust, accessibility, and encouragement.
This leads to the third phase, in which we make plans to strengthen existing programs and implement new programs that will help our incredible community live more fully into the unique gifts and resources God has blessed us with. Finally, our fourth phase will continually evaluate these initiatives, and use iterative design thinking to optimize our community even further.
This is just a brief overview of how we are using ESD’s strategic plan to take our mission, founding tenets, and Episcopal Identity and weave them into a nest that nurtures and inspires Eagles in all roles, of all ages, from all backgrounds. This is deeply rooted in the founding vision of Fr. Swann that all people are God’s children, made in the image of a Loving God, and seeks to operationalize this vision in concrete ways we all can see and feel. But there is always one more ingredient that needs to be added to any recipe for a great community – and that ingredient is you! We need you to become our best us. So, please continue to join and support us so that our community may soar with purpose and serve with love.
