In December of 2022 Maria McKnight was awarded the Unsung Hero Award for her exceptional service to the Boston community to promote child and family wellbeing.
Maria McKnight is a Boston native, mother, and former corporate worker turned curator of joy. She had a hobby of making art pieces such as fairy gardens in public parks. This passion grew during the peak of Covid due to having more time stuck inside and a child with severe anxiety who found peace and joy working with his mother to create these nuggets of joy and inspiration for the community. During this time, Maria transitioned to focus full-time on her organization 2 Birds No Stones where she organizes and develops public art installations, education stations, community sensory playdates, healing sessions, and more. Maria has set up mini outdoor yoga studios and violin play stations for locals to come and enjoy, learn, and heal. She has developed wellness trees full of free seed packets with information pamphlets on agriculture, recipes, and SNAP application instructions. She has transformed parks to host community-wide sensory playdates to bring together families with children on the autism spectrum. Where we might see a simple tree stump, Maria sees an opportunity to create something new to bring the community together around her beacons of joy. With her focus on community harmony, collective growth, and drawing people to the outdoors, Maria is using her creative passions and leadership skills to improve the Boston community.
“Fundamental to the development of a community is the enrichment of the individuals that call it home.” —Vital Village Member, 2014
Our Network uses a Service Learning and Leadership Model to create opportunities for every community member to advance along a leadership trajectory to build community capacity and engagement. There are five components to the Service Learning and Leadership Model:
Every year, Vital Village Network community members nominate an Unsung Hero—an individual who extends themselves beyond expectations in their community or organization as a leader in maximizing child health and well-being. We assemble a committee, we review each nomination, and we celebrate the recipient with the network!
“[My] spirit, body, and mind have been enlightened.” This quote captures the essence of Community Advocacy: From Knowledge to Action, a course that Vital Village Network piloted at Urban College of Boston in fall 2016. Over two years ago, the network began reflecting on a widespread inequity that exists in our community: community residents devoting hours of their free time to community transformation efforts but receiving no tangible benefits. Though service is an enriching experience, we wanted to identify more meaningful ways to contribute to their long-term personal and professional development.
What does it mean to listen? Too often, we catch the words but not the story, not the underlying meaning. This October, twenty residents came together for the third annual Social Justice Mediation Institute, a 40-hour training led by Leah Wing and Deepika Marya, to learn a new way to listen.
In December 2015, the Vital Village Network hosted a 2-day Leadership Summit. Day 1 was an intensive 1/2 day Dynamic Leadership workshop focused on developing leadership skills and building community capacity, and the Day 2 was a full day of presentations, workshops, panel discussions, and breakout sessions led by our community partners (and featuring a keynote address by Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Boston, Dr. Atiya Martin).
Last October, Vital Village Network, in collaboration with Medical-Legal Partnership Boston, and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), hosted the second annual Social Justic Mediation Institute (SJMI). Learn more about what distinguishes SJMI from other training models, the strength of our participant class of 2015, and how we collected data to measure program outcomes.
There’s something to be said about the complexity of community exchange. It is often said that it takes a village, but what it is about the village that incites the kind of positive growth and transformations that empower and change lives?
The First Teacher Team, with Dinah Shepherd, founder of First Teacher, Maritza Ortiz Bennett and Nikole Huertas, Parent Leaders at First Teacher, certainly took on this challenge head first. Their progress over the 90-Day Challenge exemplifies how tools from the Leadership Summit can be used to jumpstart and propel the great work our partners are already doing! Read more to learn about how Dinah, Maritza and Nikole engaged parent voices and used Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycles and tracking improvement strategies from the Leadership Summit in their work at First Teacher. The Leadership Summit may have been months ago, but the tools and lessons learned can carry on to the present within the work of our Network!
By Libby McClure, MS Candidate, Vital Village Emerging Leader
We are working to leverage existing data systems to establish benchmarks for assessing the well-being of children and indicators of risk and protective factors. Our goal is to improve the quality of data and tools that allow community residents and community institutions to promote family and community safety. We hope these benchmarks and shared data system will be a catalyst for community engagement and accountability.
