Craig Vezina Interview with Brian Cohen, June 10, 2020

Craig Vezina: Tell me your story. So what is your story in education and how has the Beam Center founded and it’s like the two minute version of the story.

Brian Cohen: Okay, that’s hard but the two minute version is that I grew up in a place where, the town that I grew up in Long Island from my perspective was designed to create opportunities for my own interests, and there were no walls between school, after school, playground, parks, ice skating rinks. It was all the same thing. It was all an opportunity for young people like me to do the stuff they wanted to do. And I also went to a summer camp in Pennsylvania called Lighthouse to study jazz and playing saxophone and what I found there was adults who were not that interested in being teachers. They were interested in being collaborators and even though I was focusing on playing music the feeling that I walked away with is this warmth, this relationship with adults who treated me like a peer.

So that environment sort of became an obsession with me. I went into the music business after college but never stopped thinking about starting a sleepaway camp and it was in 2002 that I read David Bornstein’s book How to Change the World and it was the first time that I started thinking about like what it was to actually design an idea for the world and I sort of started letting go of my own fantasy of recreating my bliss from the forest playing jazz, and I started thinking about what the world might need and what kids might need in the next 20-30 years. My partner Danny and I who I knew from the record business started thinking about that and what we sort of shaped our idea around was how can we help young people understand what lies behind the perfect interfaces that they were growing up and engaging with, and how can we give them an experience of authentic collaboration that it is not just about commenting on each other’s words, but engaging with each other as humans in a real way.

And the idea that we came up with to address those things was building a big project together that is designed by a designer of big thoughts and big ideas. And in essence give them an opportunity to walk inside that kind of person’s brain while learning what it takes to create a spectacular project. The skills involved, temperaments involved and most importantly the relationships that are built through that kind of collaboration.

Brian Cohen: Yes, Beam Camp started in 2005 and we were doing a lot of figuring out how to run a sleepaway camp because we are not educators. I was a parent, a reasonably young parent at the time. I think our oldest was ten at the time. We got a lot of questions like what credentials do you have. We were like well, we want kids to feel like they are capable of building beautiful things and I have a couple of kids. I think the essence of what they are signing up for is an applied experience of seeing how learning is important and relevant. And how work can be an extension of learning. And that there is not, it’s a false dichotomy to think about knowledge creation and value creation because both of those things require continual learning and a certain kind of curiosity and ambitious thinking to keep learning. How we think about environments for learning, we start with the notions of reciprocity, collaboration, love and that’s where we start.

And how we sort of give that focus is by elevating the notion of ideas and the collective creation of those ideas. Those ideas can belong to somebody within that collaboration. They can belong to somebody who we bring into those collaborations much like we do at camp when we commission our large scale projects and that designer is someone who might be an architect in Canada all of a sudden becomes part of our community. We and our youth enter into a reciprocal relationship with them because we are helping them realize one of their ideas and dreams. So we are in a certain way advocating a collectivization of learning, collectivization of achievement and to some degree the logical extension of that is collectivization of ownership as being a way forward for not only young people to live a healthy life of contentment, but for the society in general to resist some of the viruses that very tragically are being exacerbated by the current virus.

Craig Vezina: Excellent. I still want to talk about maybe you had a story that’s especially inspiring for you in terms of what young people are capable of in the work that you do.

Brian Cohen: A young woman named Brianna who comes from a Caribbean family in the heart of Brooklyn who we encountered, I think she enrolled for an apprenticeship program that we do that revolves around helping young people learn how to make things and then share that learning with younger children in the context of after school programs or community based day camps. And we build the program around a theme. So, I think the one that she was involved in was, I think she was involved in water ecology and Brianna was a person who was a good high school student and did all the things she was supposed to do in order to put herself in position to go to college. We stayed in touch with her. She worked for us after she left the apprenticeship program. She was a great teacher but she didn’t really have a sense of her own value. And sure enough she enrolled in City College and had the experience of being told that she was valueless.

And struggled with staying in school. Our response to that was to give her more responsibility. And what we watched happen was to have this person who felt valueless and had difficulty speaking her own truth. She has become a valuable member of our staff. She started as being an assistant to that apprenticeship program. She is now leading a component of that program that we call the Project Leaders Program where those apprentices are employed to share their knowledge with young people and she is not yet back in college. But we can see her starting to assemble her own criteria for what she needs in order to go back to school and get the kind of education and learning that will make her feel valued. I can’t wait to see that next step because it’s going to teach us a lot about how kids assemble their own identity while by assembling what it is they need and being able to articulate it. [00:08:04]

Craig Vezina: Thank you for that story. I’m very interested in how you know when that’s happening. I was talking to someone in South Africa the other day and I loved one of the KPIs. The biggest KPI they have is lights and eyes, right. So it’s not something quantitative. So how do you know when something magical is happening?

Brian Cohen: Well, the first sign is that they return. The second sign is that they take ownership and feel like not only that they belong. A young person feels like that belong but they have agency within our space to have a point of view and express it. For us the crystallizing experience that Tom Hatch sort of planted the idea of the crystallizing experience that Tom planted in our brain happens when the group takes up an idea of yours and you feel the trust to be able to let that group help you expand, improve, embellish that idea. And it happens at all scales. It can literally be like, why don’t we use the screwdriver instead of the hammer or it can be something much more significant than as let’s have a WhatsApp group to communicate with our team and cohort because they don’t want to talk to you on video. And so we recognize it when we see someone feel like their idea is valuable and useful to the group. And I wish I could get away with saying that our KPI was lights and eyes because I think that’s a pretty damn good KPI.

Craig Vezina: Yeah, no doubt. I mean I feel like in education we need to hone in on those KPIs and Tom has talked a bit about how we can do that. Without the measurement tools I think people are going to struggle to go where they want to go. I want to make sure, I’m guessing because you love music so much that you see a lot of analogies with kind of jazz and the things that happen in music.

Brian Cohen: For me, and also I get very emotional about it, the opening of my heart came from hearing jazz as a young person from as early as the age of ten. My older brother introduced me to that music and my parents bought me my first Louis Armstrong records at ten and I discovered my first Miles Davis record shortly thereafter. Of course I can remember the exact store I was in when my grandfather took me, but there was obviously something for me very meaningful about the mode of expression that those artists and many like them were using. And it certainly interested me enough to become very involved in learning how to participate in that form of expression. I took saxophone lessons from an early age. My sort of way of being in the world was to identify as a jazz player and from a very early age and I was precocious and I got involved in a lot of jazz ensembles. It was the thing that directed my progress through life.

My college essay was about music. But along with that I checked out every single book from fourth grade on about black history, black thought, black struggle, black everything. And Leroy Jones, Amiri Baraka’s Blues People book was the first to blow the top of my head off in terms of giving a social context, a nondominant historical context or black people’s evolution, emergence, expression and where that sort of came together for me was the idea of the art form of jazz being unique in bringing together virtuosity, collective creation, communication, reciprocal communication and most importantly this sort of balance between or precarious balance between individual expression and collaborative achievement. It happens at all levels of jazz music, in all genres of it and I did not realize when we started camp that what we were doing by building big projects in the forest with young people was our form of that kind of collective creation that balances the individual and the collective.

When we started working with public school students exclusively in New York City, children from immigrant backgrounds, black and brown students who are the primary populations that we deal with, for the first time I realized why we have to listen to those young people. Because they embody in many respects the abilities to express individually while working communally and that the practice that we had developed sort of met them at their place of natural strength. And it also indicated to us why the factory model of public education ahs continued to fail those students over the decades to the point now where it’s sort of understood that it doesn’t work. So I’m not sure if I’m connecting all of the strands together, but I feel like I’m back where I was in fourth grade, in awe of a particular mode of intelligence that I can only be a sort of celebrator of and hopefully be a facilitator for its elevation as being the most important thing that happens next, not just a genre of something else. That’s all I got. [00:14:36]

Craig Vezina: That was beautifully expressed. Thank you for that, Brian. I appreciate that. Here's a question that I ask everyone. What do you think is the most incredible human superpower?

Brian Cohen: The most incredible human superpower is the ability to find a mode of expression that is as satisfying to oneself as it can be beneficial to the people that you love. And to have that expression serve as a way of sustenance and healing. Our emergence into the New York City ecosystem of learning and youth development has been – we’ve entered into it as sort of learners and people come with great humility because we’re not perfect. We don’t consider ourselves professionals. We don’t really understand the political dynamics of the structures of that ecosystem. So we’ve been able to sort of act as an observer and when we’re lucky as a catalyst for change and reevaluation. But what I’ve known to be true from the beginning of that journey is that – and I’m seeing now happen because out of necessity in this particular period is that we have to stop coming to every conversation with our own agenda and self-interest at the top of the list for how we have that conversation. We have to find a way to put that aside and to focus on the people who are at the center of the conversation.

The young people, the educators, the families, the communities and we really have to be willing to be courageously and brutally challenging of each other to make sure that we’re really doing that because all of our job descriptions say that we’re doing that but when we come to the conversations to find next steps it’s often bullshit that we are doing it and it’s hard and it’s very difficult especially in an environment where you have to get budget, you have to find funding, you have to persuade electeds. But you know what – we can’t even go out of our fucking houses right now. And the young people and their parents can’t go out of their fucking houses. So let’s put the money contest aside for a minute and figure out what we’re actually going to do and ask the young people what they need.

Craig Vezina: Very well said. I think people talk a very good game. They always have. I think you put your finger on the proof of the pudding. I also think there are some people who struggle with the how. It’s not the why. It’s not disingenuous. It’s just they struggle with the how.

Brian Cohen: That’s true.

Craig Vezina: This is actually more for parents. Let’s end on this one. So many parents want to do this and they know their kids hopefully better than anybody. Is there some general advice we can give some parents on how to help support young people in what we’re talking about?

Brian Cohen: You’re walking me right into a contradiction to what I just said and it’s also not necessarily a popular thing that I’m about to say but people of means who have privilege and access to capital and live in a world that is easily navigable for them parents like that are the ecosystem for their children’s development. In the most mundane terms they figure out the trumpet lessons and when the schools are inadequate they advocate for their child or they can help their child advocate for themselves. They create connections and they are the mentor of social capital for their child. That’s not exclusively something that people of needs can do. There are many people that can do it but it’s primarily something that affluent people have access to. For young people and parents who do not have access to those things and for whom navigation is not as easy for primarily systemic reasons there has to be supports within the ecosystem that I wouldn’t say substitute but build capacity and scaffolding for that exact kind of ecosystem.

And that is where all the people that I talked about before come together not in their own agenda but focusing on those parents and children who need those supports in the ecosystem. That is what all those people who can provide those supports need to be thinking about and talking about and talking with. So I didn’t answer your question because there are all kinds of tips and tricks for parents. The ones that I’ve always relied on are being prepared to share your imperfections with your children. Being prepared to tell your children you don’t know the answer and being prepared to tell your children that you just made a big mistake in the way you talked to them and what you just told them. And at the same time and this is the true art of parenting, at the same time the art of parenting at the same time being their protector and their moral, ethical guide. And sometimes that’s a brutal balance because sometimes they’re not going to agree and sometimes they’re not going to see the whole picture and sometimes they’re not at the developmental stage where they can make the decision to do the right thing. So it’s quite a balance to express your imperfection and also let your kids know that you can help them make the right decision.