Learning to Citizen with the Green School Bali: Our 4th Global Saturday Salon

The first salon of our new series “Learning to Citizen: Tales of Youth Voices, Agency, and Care” happened on Saturday, May 9th, 2026. Our guest speakers were Dr. Benjamin Freud, Strategic Lead for Regenerative Education at The Green School Bali and Co-founder of Coconut Thinking, Manon Tiange, Grade 12 student mapping labor invisibility and systemic inequality in Bali, and Scarlett Gonella, Grade 12 student investigating plastic pollution and advocating for clean water access in Indonesia.

The Second Series of Global Saturday Salons

In our first series, we kept returning to a question: what does it mean to learn in relationship with place, with nature, with each other? We heard stories from Argentina and India that showed us what shifts when education grows from context and trust instead of content delivery. Education stops being something we transmit. It becomes something we live.

This new series builds on that foundation and takes up a vital invocation from educator and former speaker Deb L. Morrison: meet agency where it lives. Begin with what people care about, and the places they inhabit.

Our goal is to honor learners and teachers who are already doing the work practicing care, enacting citizenship, and learning how to regenerate their worlds. That is why we've named this series: Learning to Citizen: Tales of Youth Voices, Agency, and Care”. 

The voices from the Green School Bali

The theme "Learning to Citizen: Tales of Youth Voices, Agency, and Care" came vividly to life through the work of Benjamin and students Scarlett and Manon from Green School Bali.

Benjamin described an educational culture rooted not in test scores or performance metrics, but in contribution, relationship, and community impact. Pushing back on the very notion of "student voice," he argued it is hollow without genuine listening and structural power-sharing — echoing Malcolm X's adage that being at the table only matters if you're a diner. At Green School Bali, students pursue projects that respond to real social and ecological challenges, developing expertise in service of others rather than for individual achievement alone. 

Scarlett shared how her project evolved from concerns about plastic pollution and water scarcity in Indonesia into a multifaceted initiative — building recharge wells, partnering with Colombian organization Eco Group H2O, and installing a rainwater harvesting system at a remote school in Lombok, where she returned with her family to build the system alongside the school's own principal. "Nothing was simultaneous," she reflected. "It was all evolving as I went through."

Manon's project, Who Makes Your World?, examined labor invisibility and the informal work sector in Bali, where roughly 1.6 million workers sustain a $10 billion tourism industry without contracts, union protections, or social security. Through worker interviews, systems mapping workshops, and original piano compositions inspired by workers' stories, she sought to make visible the lives and labor that keep Bali running — and to spark structural change.

Both students reflected on how Green School nurtured their agency by treating them as capable contributors whose voices genuinely shape the community. Rather than positioning students as passive recipients of education, the school cultivates a culture where learners are trusted to ask difficult questions, collaborate across generations, and imagine reform at the highest levels. 

Throughout the discussion, participants returned to the idea that "learning to citizen" means more than civic education — it means creating environments where young people can practice care, responsibility, and participation in the real world.

Resources shared during our Salon

Scarlett Gonella shared:

• Her Petition “How Unsafe Water Access Fuels an Indonesia Plastic Crisis”

• Her Greenstone Project Instagram account @waterforall.greenstone

Dr. Benjamin Freud shared:

• A podcast episode by "Coming Home to Life" where he and Manish Jain of Ecoversities talked about Reimagining Education. Listen here

• To know more about the Green School Bali, head to their website

Alfred Kurland shared how lovely it would be to have The Green School project and others that emphasize students as change makers incorporated into this syllabus:

• "In NY State Legislature there are pending bills mandating student Participatory civics for all students in grades 5 -12 in NY State. The bill language specifically mandates hands on school approaches, PBL and joining efforts of change makers. Sponsors are State Senator Robert Jackson, S06763 (contact: johanna@senatorjackson.com) and Jo Anne Simon in Assembly A 01106 (simonj@nyassembly.com).

Emmanuel Ponchon, a member of Educating for The World We Want, invited participants to know more and join our Working Circles: "Shared questions turned into small groups working together in between Salons".

Our next Salon with The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis)

The Learning to Citizen series continues on May 30, 2026 at 11:30am EDT with guests from The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis), a Harlem-based organization that has spent more than 30 years at the forefront of racial, economic, educational, environmental, and gender justice.

Joining the conversation will be Nando Rodriguez, BroSis's Senior Manager for Environmental Programming, alongside members Camila Salcedo, 16, and Elias De Leon, 17 — two high school students who have been part of the BroSis community for years.

Through "unconditional love, wraparound support, and programming that invites Black and Latinx young people to examine their roots, define their stories, and awaken their agency", BroSis embodies exactly what it means to learn to citizen. Their work asks the same questions that animate this entire series: what becomes possible when we stop teaching democracy as content to be memorized, and start living it together?

Click here to save your spot now (pay-what-you-can).