The R.T. Fisher Ecosystem

The 22nd Annual Student Achievement & Excellence Awards filled Chabot College on May 31. That is over two decades of honoring Black excellence, with thousands of scholars recognized since 2004. Academic Excellence. Academic Potential. Cultural Leadership. The Arts. Every one of them called by name.

STEP UP! Summer Experience ran June 15–18 at Rosa Parks Elementary with Healthy Black Families, Berkeley Unified, and AAREA. Four days on Freedom, Belonging, Stewardship, and Legacy, built around one question: how do we learn from the past so we can create a more just future? It was Sankofa in a room full of elementary students getting ready for their next step.

And this fall, on campus.

The work did not stop when summer did. This fall, scholars are building community, making art, and learning together on their own campuses. Want a program like this at your school? Our playbooks and 30+ years of expert program development help your team build and run its own.

All summer we ran professional learning with teachers and site teams: hands in the work, not sitting through slides. In September we took it into schools. Whole staffs worked side by side, sorting ideas on cards, looking hard at what they already know about their students, and working through The Roots Are Already Here, a session that uses the baobab as its method.

September 2026. Whole staffs, one room, real work: cards on the table, data on the screen, and The Roots Are Already Here in hand.

You can have all of it. The question is the order. Your team is already working hard on programs, supports, professional learning, and data systems. We help school leaders work out what needs attention first, match the right response to the real need, and build systems the staff can sustain.

Diagnosis before prescription. Built with your team. Designed to sustain.

Everything we know about the moments students move up, written down so a first-time coordinator can run it. One master template plus event-specific editions: a Black-to-School playbook, and Transition Fair playbooks for both 5th→6th and 8th→9th. Same structure every time, local content every time.

Because what we say to students, they end up saying to themselves.

Cultivate Brilliance is our line of wearables and learning kits: language of possibility that students, families, and staff can carry. Buy one for yourself, or outfit a whole team for the year.

They make great gifts for a colleague, a mentor, a graduate, or the whole team.

Shop at choosecollege.store

Real tools, not worksheets. Each kit turns a child into a scientist for the week, with a Scientific Method Notebook to record every question, hypothesis, and result, and Innovator Challenge Cards that pair a real scientist’s story with a hands-on mission.

The Radio Kit. A voltage detector to find where electricity lives, a mini tape measure, and a battery holder for building simple circuits, plus permission to fail forward. Scholars build in the footsteps of Black inventors like Granville T. Woods and Lewis Latimer, whose work in electricity and communication helped power the modern world.

The Garden Lab. A see-through root viewer to watch what happens underground, real non-GMO okra seeds, and a week of walking in George Washington Carver’s footsteps. It grows indoors, so a sunny windowsill is all it needs.

Kits are packed to order. Orders close November 6.

Pre-order your kits

Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other country in the Americas, and Bahia sits at the heart of that history. African traditions still shape its music, faith, food, language, and resistance. We will study survival, adaptation, and cultural continuity on the ground, in relationship and not as spectators.

Faculty resident: Professor Nzingha Dugas, Chair of Black Studies at Contra Costa College and a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil.

We will follow up with the Brazil flyer and presentation.
Ghana. Cuba. Haiti. St. Lucia. Europe. Brazil is next.

For eighteen consecutive years, educators have gathered with us for a day of practice that travels home. This year the whole Summit is focused on the moments students move up, and what it takes to carry Black students through them well.

▶ Watch highlights from PDS17

Step inside last year’s Summit. This is what the room feels like.

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Congratulations to our partners at 6:3 Media Group and Brandon Hughes Productions on the sold-out premiere of In Times Such as These: Revolutionary Leadership in Action on August 25 at the historic Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, and on the September 20 screening in Atlanta.

6:3 Media Group is an independent company. Its services are offered by 6:3 Media Group, not by R.T. Fisher Educational Enterprises, and inquiries go directly to them.