The Brief – November — The Charlotte Center

Nov 30

Nov 30 The Brief – November

Mark Peres

NOVEMBER 2021

CONTENT

Talk It Out

Giving Tuesday

5 Questions with Community Leader Banu Valladares

A Word

JULY 2021

Talk It Out

Why does talking get such a bad rap? Conversation. Dialogue. Discourse. However you frame it, speaking can unlock our souls. When we talk, we reveal ourselves and, in listening, we discover others. Still, while a crucial form of communication, the way we talk about, well, talk is telling.

Talking honestly and beyond the surface—airing our concerns and fears, sharing our hopes and ideas—is vital to critical thinking, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution. Any further action benefits from the knowledge, understanding, and perhaps even trust gained through the conversation.

Earlier this month, The Forum with Dr. Allison Bickett exhibited the transformative power of talking things out, exchanging perspectives, and giving voice to our struggles and striving. This was evident not only in her presentation on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) and the Balint process, but also the audience’s lively table talk and poignant stories. Carving time to express and explore our deepest thoughts, wildest ideas, and boldest plans is important and productive. To be heard and understood is essential for our flourishing.

Next month, The Charlotte Center will engage in Civic Reflection facilitator training. Civic Reflection discussions use the humanities for reflective reading and conversation to open up important questions for ourselves, our organizations, and our community. In the new year, The Charlotte Center looks forward to nurturing more talk that helps expand imagination and build bridges of understanding for groups seeking to serve the common good.

“Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?”

— Charles Lindbergh, History-making American aviator

5 Questions • Banu Valladares

An interview with the arts-minded, Venezuela-born

executive director of Charlotte Bilingual Preschool

BY VALAIDA FULLWOOD

A native of Venezuela, Banu Valladares moved from her home country to attend UNC Charlotte, where she earned a master’s degree in Literature. Her career has spanned education, the arts, and the humanities, including years of service with the North Carolina Humanities Council, the North Carolina Arts Council, and SonEdna, a Mississippi-based alliance that celebrates and promotes the literary arts and writers of all genres and backgrounds. Her experience also includes providing capacity-building support to community-based African American, Asian American, Latinx, and American Indian cultural arts organizations. She is the author of a bilingual book of poetry, Gypsy Child: Dancing without Veils.

Valladares is Executive Director of Charlotte Bilingual Preschool (CltBP). She represents the interests of Charlotte’s Latinx families and informs early childhood education policy on the Mecklenburg County Early Learning Initiative Executive Committee, the NC Early Childhood Advisory Council, and the NC Early Education Foundation. In 2019, Leading on Opportunity honored Valladares by naming her one of 50 local “Opportunity Champions”.

Emigrating from South America to the American South, you must have developed sharp skills for navigating language. What’s one thing you find fascinating about language?

How fluid it is. Language is just so incredibly fluid.

I remember learning English in school. I had teachers from all over the place – Great Britain, Australia, Venezuela, and the United States. They all brought their own nuance to language and accents. Coming to Charlotte, I remember being super baffled by the word “guy”. In all my years of studying, I didn’t know what a “guy” was. [Laughter]

The other thing that is fascinating about language is that it gives you this ability to connect at a way deeper level. I found how deeply rooted I am, and oral cultures are, to the sound of my native tongue. Not hearing my native tongue was the most challenging lesson to learn when I came to the U.S. I knew the language. I knew the culture. I had traveled here plenty. I had money. But not hearing Spanish was difficult. Spanish for me is the language of mother love. That may be why we gravitate to others who speak our language when we travel or are in place where our own language isn’t spoken.

You’ve worked in visual and literary arts organizations and a humanities council, what’s been the draw from you?

As a child I was hyper. My brain works really fast, and I learn quickly. The way I was able to survive school was through the arts. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, and the nuns would send me outside to do projects. I would create whatever project was available. There was freedom to explore the world with artistic expression.

I was that little ham who was always on the stage creating shows, dancing, and performing theater. I did the whole shebang. At one point, I thought I might want to be a professional ballet dancer or professional dancer, period. There are so many ways to express yourself. I grew up in a country where the arts abounded. My mother was a visual artist. My dad played the piano, and he sang. We were surrounded by the arts. There is something beautiful about the lens that artists bring to the world. We are divergent thinkers.

One of the highlights of my career has been working with high-achieving artists. People who dedicate their lives to their art form. I learned that these artists have such mastery of their skills, and that they are wrestling with something internally. They end up communicating something into their art form, via canvas, poem or anything, that speaks to something in you. One of my favorite things to do is to stand in front of art and just look at it to see what it brings to me—particularly if I dislike it. If my immediate reaction is yuck, then I look at it and say, “what is it that makes me hate it?” The more I look at it the more I see the beauty of it.

The space that the arts create to transcend the day-to-day monotony of day to day is what attracted me to be in the arts for so long. There’s a sense that we can really connect with that part in us that is larger than the doing, the being part. It is very spiritual for me. I am concerned about the state of our spiritual life as the human race. By creating opportunities for people to reflect more deeply beyond material things, we will be able to create better humans in the future. There’s a part of me that wants to provide a pathway for enlightenment. There’s a bit of altruism in it for me too.

It’s been something of a leap, I imagine, to now lead Charlotte Bilingual Preschool. What do you see as a key to your students’ and families’ flourishing?

It’s been quite an unexpected leap.

When I came back from Mississippi, after doing amazing social justice work in that region, I had my job at the N.C. Humanities Council. That was a really great job, creating thoughtful conversations with people. During that time, we experienced the uprisings and the massacre of Black people, which were so disturbing to me. And the Chetty report came out that said Charlotte is 50 out of 50 cities for economic mobility. That was dismal information. Here I am, a Pollyanna, trying to change the world and then to see that. In conversations it become really clear to me that I wanted to do more.

I went to a Black Lives Matter-Charlotte conversation where the importance of education was discussed. My work in the arts has been arts education, and I’ve taught every possible grade level as a teaching artist and Spanish teacher. I remember saying to the universe, “put me where I need to be for my people who are experiencing horrible marginalization.” Charlotte Bilingual School showed up. They found me! So, it wasn’t a huge leap.

There are lots of things about the school that I love. It’s a place where you feel welcome immediately. It normalizes your experience as an immigrant because there you’re a majority. At our school, children and families know that people speak their language and understand their cultural norms and customs. They begin to heal from the challenges of coming to the United States, being in a different culture, and hearing the national rhetoric around immigration, which has been less than ideal. That is what the school does. It has been healing for me to be in a place where I am heard, and I don’t have to explain who I am. I see that for families and children and then we watch them thrive.

It’s a matter of justice and dignity. If you have a place where you can really be you, you thrive. That’s for everybody.

What’s your happy place and why?

On my gosh, children! The second I walk into Charlotte Bilingual Preschool, I’m surrounded by tiny little people—3- and 4-year-olds. At that age, you are you. There’s no B.S. You haven’t figured out how to lie or how to pose. You’re just you. I have found that up until around age 5, we haven’t lost our connection to our true essence. These babies will tell you exactly how they feel. They will come and hug you!

That, plus understanding the important transformative work we are doing where these children will have a future that is not as challenging as children who are not having our preschool experiences. These children will be ready for kindergarten. That makes me joyful all day long. What I’m doing actually matters; I am going to leave the world a better place. Whew, that is a happy, happy place!

What’s a dream you have for Charlotte?

My big dream for Charlotte is that we are place where everybody can be who they are and there are no barriers to where you want to go. But we have a long, long way to go, to get where Black and brown people have unconstrained opportunities.

I do see possibilities today with the investments the Mayor’s office is making turning Charlotte into an equity beacon of the nation. There’s so much more conversation and interaction we need to have. I wish we had many more opportunities to meet the “other” where they are, so we can be transformed. I want to see Charlotte as being a place where your language, your ethnicity, and anything you bring to the table is an asset. It may be a kumbaya dream, but that’s my yummy dream for the city.

Follow Banu Valladares!

About The Charlotte Center

WHERE THE CURIOUS ENGAGE FOR GOOD.

Our mission is to help people and communities flourish. Flourishing is a peak state of well-being. It is all-encompassing: physical, mental, moral, spiritual, and social. At the heart of it is a strong sense of meaning, mastery, and mattering, in which all people are able to live into the best versions of themselves.

The Charlotte Center accomplishes its mission by bringing curious people together to explore challenges and opportunities that affect human flourishing through the lens of the humanities and civic imagination. The humanities pose deep questions, help address complex and imperfect information, and provide critical and creative tools for problem-solving and the invention of new visions. Our programs deepen human connection and strengthen personal and civic agency.

The more we know about ourselves, the wiser we are in what we do.

Why must we gather?

OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT.