MPA Program at CCNY and Amy Sprecher
Amy Sprecher (MPA ‘22) is an award-winning media producer specializing in mission-driven communications and is owner and president of The Sprecher Company, LLC. A native from Ohio, Amy started marching for human rights with her family at a young age and continues marching today. She is passionate about creating spaces for deep dialogue between people of all backgrounds to overcome divisions and build movement solidarity and unity. Drawing upon her expertise in communications and her research as an MPA student, she designed a workshop series that goes beyond traditional anti-bias training by adding the broader project of building a united, multi-racial working class movement for social change. Sprecher discusses the project in greater detail in this interview.
What is the primary goal of your project?
The primary goal of my project is to create an interactive curriculum for diverse groups of adults that goes beyond anti-bias and cultural competency training by adding in two critical fundamentals:
- an awareness of the positive and vital reasons for building a multicultural community that includes an understanding that when the working class of all backgrounds come together in force, the quality of life is lifted for everyone because of the ability to achieve a large and potent enough powerbase to effectively make change for the good including equity in civil rights, social justice, and basic human rights, and
- the urgent need to increase our capacity to dismantle existing barriers that are keeping us from affecting lasting universal social change.
Building CommUnity is a multicultural group discovery process using a unique blend of elements including shared storytelling, racial healing, educating, guiding, and communication techniques. It reflects an understanding of how powerful messaging is and that what we say and how we speak to each other matters. I brought to the project my own decades-long expertise in communications as well as my in-depth research throughout this MPA program. I believe that the Building CommUnity curriculum is a template of “how” we can both uncover and dismantle insidious barriers that exist between people of all backgrounds, and begin to build more vibrant and equitable multicultural collective action in any environment, whether that be in government, in our own communities, workplaces, education settings and more.
What motivated you to work on this project?
There were two main motivating factors.
The first is the obvious inability for our government, both nationally and locally, to get anything done. Beyond the huge divide between the right and the left, the left is so divided that there has been a lack of agreement on hugely important issues.
The second is from my personal experience. I have been creating and producing mission-driven content for my entire career including executive producing Toddworld™, the preschool television series designed to teach preschool children the importance of diversity and based on Todd Parr’s award-winning and best-selling book, It’s Ok to Be Different. For the last five years I have been a co-producer of the non-profit musical, Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom, based on the award-winning memoir of the youngest marcher (Lynda Blackmon Lowery) in the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March of 1965. During the live tour that ended in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I developed a heightened awareness of the intrinsic distrust and suspicion between people of color and white people, even when we are working toward similar social goals.
I have realized that many people under the age of 40 have very little knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement and the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr. King was my hero growing up and still is now. He made me feel seen with his words about not being judged by the color of my skin, in my case because I am culturally Jewish and was an “other” in my home-town in Ohio and in college in Indiana. He spoke often about the need for people of color and white people to come together in unity.
Having firsthand experience of these disconnects and assumptions, as well as witnessing and hearing the frustration from a number of my diverse community of friends and colleagues that so many people do not have the tools to speak to and understand people that are different from them and as a consequence retreat to their own homogenous corners, I made the decision that we are in such a pivotal and frankly terrifying time in our history, that I needed to go back to school in order to try to discover what tools might already exist and to hopefully develop one that could make a difference in helping to put the word “unity” back into the word community.
What was the most memorable part of this experience as a Changemaker fellow?
Unquestionably, witnessing the bond that formed between every member of our diverse pilot participant group – ranging from early 20’s to our eldest participant of 92! – that began with skepticism, with many aha moments in between, and ended with being both moved and inspired, and wanting more workshops so that they could continue the discussions and begin to strategize how to move forward.
How would you like to scale this project to reach more people?
My partner, co-facilitator, and co-curator, Aaliytha Stevens (Chief Operating Officer of SpotCo), and I would like to take this methodology into workplaces, education settings, and community gatherings. We are working to secure bookings right now as well as speaking to business advisors that can help us with strategy and funding. We are also beginning to have conversations with organizations with similar missions to potentially build partner coalitions.
How can people support your work?
Spread the word that this methodology exists and hire us! Please reach out to me directly at amy@sprecherent.com .
Amy Sprecher created this project with support from the MPA Changemaker Fellowship, a program that supports MPA students who propose a project that will apply the skillsets they are learning in the program to a community issue while advancing their own professional development. Find out more.