On July 28–29, educators, school and district teams, and community partners from across Western North Carolina gathered at Southwestern Community College for the 2026 WNC Resilience Project Summer Convening: Pathways to Resilience.

This wasn’t designed as a traditional conference. We wanted people to connect across roles and communities, learn from what is already working across the region, and leave with something they could actually use: a clearer picture of an experience they want to improve for students and a practical first step toward making it happen.

Starting with connection

We began with mountain music, movement, and storytelling led by Heidi Kulas—grounding the gathering in the culture and community of Western North Carolina before moving into two days of collaborative learning and design.

From there, participants explored five Essential Conditions that have emerged through the WNC Resilience Project’s broader learning:

• Belonging, Wellbeing & Student Support

• Community-Connected & Career-Connected Learning

• Student Thinking, Inquiry & Communication

• Adult Collaboration & Improvement Systems

• Leadership for Continuous Improvement

Through a modified World Café, participants rotated through conversations about each condition, sharing examples from their communities, identifying existing asset, naming gaps, and considering small changes that might improve what students actually experience.

A few themes showed up again and again.

Belonging grows through relationships and representation. Participants talked about students having trusted adults, feeling known, seeing themselves reflected in their schools, and having meaningful opportunities to contribute.

Learning becomes more powerful when it connects beyond the classroom. Community partnerships, local challenges, careers, and opportunities to work alongside people doing meaningful work can help students see greater purpose in what they are learning.

Students need opportunities to do more of the thinking. Inquiry, discussion, reflection, authentic projects, and communicating ideas for real audiences all surfaced as important ways to move students from completing work to actively making meaning.

Adult collaboration matters when students can feel the difference. Participants highlighted shared planning, teacher collaboration, classroom observation, feedback, and opportunities for educators to learn from one another—not collaboration simply for its own sake.

And across all five conditions, leadership matters enormously. Protecting time, aligning priorities, removing barriers, elevating educator voice, and making effective practices visible can create the conditions for good ideas to grow.

The World Café was intentionally structured around a simple question: What would students experience differently if this condition became stronger?

That kept the conversation focused not simply on programs or adult practices, but on the students those systems are meant to serve.

Turning ideas into a Pathway to Resilience

On Day 2, participants moved from collective reflection to action.

Using the Pathway to Resilience Builder, teams and individuals worked to identify:

What students experience now → What we envision for the future → A change worth trying → Milestones along the way → Barriers we may encounter → Evidence that can help us learn.

The goal was to make an idea visible enough to take the first steps and begin learning from it.

That approach reflects a larger commitment of the WNC Resilience Project: start small, learn together, and improve through action. The project’s improvement approach similarly encourages teams to test manageable Change Ideas, collect light evidence, study what happens, and adapt rather than waiting until every detail is perfect.

What we’re carrying forward

This event reaffirmed that educators and communities are already trying things.

They are building stronger relationships with students, creating more authentic learning experiences, connecting young people to community and career opportunities, experimenting with new ways to collaborate, and finding ways to improve the systems around them.

The opportunity for the WNC Resilience Project is to help make that work more visible, more connected, and easier to learn from.

That means creating spaces where people can share what they are trying, examine what they are learning, adapt ideas to their own context, and contribute those lessons back to the region.

Resources you can use

One of our commitments through the WNC Resilience Project is to make the tools we develop available for others to adapt.

If something from the Summer Convening could help your classroom, team, school, or community, please use it, remix it, and let us know what you learn.

A few places to start:

• Essential Conditions World Café — a facilitated protocol for exploring student needs, Bright Spots, community assets, gaps, and possible tests across the five Essential Conditions.

• Pathway to Resilience Builder — a practical tool for moving from a student-centered need or opportunity toward a first Change Idea, milestones, barriers, and evidence for learning.

• WNCRP Reflections Mini-Zine (Cut and Fold) — based on a COVID pandemic activity shared by L.A. Johnson for NPR's Life Kit in 2020, this hands on reflection journal can be customized and printed for your students or staff.

These tools are designed to offer structure without rigidity. Schools and teams can begin with a manageable idea, adapt the process to their context, and build as their learning and confidence grow.

How to stay involved

The Summer Convening was one moment in a much larger regional effort—and there are several ways to stay connected.

Join the WNC Resilience Project Learning Lab. If you have an idea you want to move forward this year, the Learning Lab offers a supported way to develop it alongside educators from across the region. Teams will start with a locally meaningful challenge or opportunity, identify a Change Idea, and use simple cycles of testing and reflection to learn what works. Click Here for more info.

Use the tools on your own. You don’t have to join a formal cohort to participate. Schools, teams, and individual educators are welcome to adapt the Pathway to Resilience, World Café prompts, improvement tools, and other open resources to support work already happening in their communities.

Share what you’re learning. If you try one of these tools, launch a new idea, or already have a promising practice underway, we want to hear about it. The network becomes more useful when educators and communities can learn from one another.

Attend WNC Resilience Project Convenings. Stay tuned for the Fall 2026, Spring 2027, and Summer 2027 Convenings. The best place to get up to date information is by visiting the WNC Resilience Project website or signing up for Open Way Learning's mailing list by clicking here.

Reach out if your school is working on something that could use support. The WNC Resilience Project is not a packaged program. Our role is to help schools and educators strengthen work that is already emerging locally through thought partnership, facilitation, coaching, connections, and practical improvement tools.

The WNC Resilience Project is supported by the Leon Levine Foundation and Dogwood Health Trust.