When a Lab Becomes a Container for Courage Reflections with Nicodemus Ford

When we first imagined the Learning & Design Lab in Rialto, we knew what the contract required. A healing response. A set of design cycles. A clear scope. What we didn’t know—what we couldn’t have known—was what the space itself would become.

In conversation with Nicodemus Ford, who co-facilitated the Lab with us, one phrase kept resurfacing: a container for courage.

Nicodemus came into the work with deep experience in restorative practices, human-centered design, and community healing. From his vantage point, the Lab was never just about deliverables. It became a space where trust could form quickly, where truth could be spoken without being managed away, and where educators were invited into something more honest than the systems they work inside every day.

As he put it, “We’re creating something much larger with much deeper impact than what the contract was stating.”

That observation mirrors my own experience. On paper, the Lab was framed as a response to racialized harm and a structured effort to build educator agency through design. In practice, it became something far more relational. By listening closely, staying present in moments of discomfort, and pushing when it mattered, we created conditions where educators felt seen—not as implementers, but as thinkers, designers, and truth-tellers.

What struck Nicodemus most was the pace. Within six to eight months—an unusually short window in district work—we were operating meaningfully at the site level, building trust with principals and teachers, and modeling a partnership approach that felt genuinely different. Not performative. Not extractive. Just human.

One of the most powerful shifts in the Lab came through a practice Nicodemus introduced: compassionate witnessing. Adapted from his graduate work at the International Institute for Restorative Practices and Kaethe Weingarten’s Common Shock, this approach moves beyond empathy interviews or solution-seeking. It asks something simpler—and harder.

Can we hold space for people to name harm without rushing to fix it?
Can we decenter ourselves so the story stays with the person who lived it?
Can we allow acknowledgment to be enough, at least for the moment?

When we practiced this—even in abbreviated form—the room changed. Phones disappeared. Laptops closed. Bodies leaned forward. The question was no longer, What are we going to do about this right now? It became, Are we actually listening?

Nicodemus named something I felt but hadn’t articulated: that compassionate witnessing, when done well, is an intervention in itself. Sometimes what a nervous system needs isn’t a policy shift or a strategic plan—it’s for someone to say, plainly, That was messed up. In those moments, you could feel people exhale.

At the same time, the Lab surfaced real constraints. Nicodemus was clear about this, and I agree. Principals showed up with openness and a genuine desire to do better for students, even while operating within a district ecosystem that often felt misaligned or unhealthy. Teachers showed courage and clarity while juggling overlapping initiatives, unclear communication, and the lingering absence of district-level accountability for the racialized harm that sparked this work in the first place.

That absence matters. Without structured spaces for student and family dialogue, community acknowledgment, and collective healing, the work remains incomplete. This is where external partners—and aligned funders—become critical. Healing and redesign cannot rest solely on the shoulders of educators already stretched thin.

When I asked Nicodemus what he would design next, his answer was disarmingly practical: fund the prototypes.

Not in abstract ways. Not with performative innovation language. But with modest, meaningful resources—enough for school teams to test ideas, gather feedback across sites, refine their thinking, and share what they’ve learned. Funding prototypes is more than a budget line. It’s a signal. It says: We trust you. We believe your ideas are worth resourcing.

Most initiatives in education ask educators to do more with the same constraints. Resourcing prototypes flips that script. It treats educators as researchers and designers, not just implementers of someone else’s vision.

As we look ahead, I keep returning to what feels most unfinished—and most possible. There is healing work that still needs to be named and held. And there is educator-led redesign ready to grow, if we are willing to resource it at a scale that matches the harm and the hope present in our schools.

The Lab reminded me that courage doesn’t emerge from compliance. It emerges when people feel safe enough to tell the truth—and supported enough to imagine something better.