The Lessons Ghana Taught Me About Fighting For All (Reflections from Ghana)

From Ghana to Your Inbox: Youth Empowerment Insights

I'm writing this from a completely different headspace than when I boarded my flight to Ghana this July. What started as a 10-day trip with the Youth Mentoring Action Network (YMAN) became a journey that fundamentally shifted how I see my work, my voice, and our collective responsibility to protect education for all.

If I'm being honest, I almost didn't want to go. I had so much studying to do, literature reviews to complete about Black women's access to supportive and inclusive education. Even during my first few days in Ghana, I kept my head buried in my laptop, frantically trying to hit word counts while missing the profound lessons happening right in front of me.

I almost missed the biggest education of my life.

The Community That Shapes Our Future

Visiting the Cynthia B. Dillard School was transformative. Seeing the work of Dr. Cynthia B. Dillard, who founded the primary and junior high school in Ghana, and witnessing Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan's leadership through YMAN, I understood something viscerally that I'd only known intellectually: it takes true community to nurture the minds of our future leaders, who we forget are our current children.

The main theme threading through the teaching of W.E.B. Du Bois's work, Dr. Dillard's educational vision, and Dr. Weiston-Serdan's mentoring approach was community. Not the surface-level networking we often call community, but the deep, intentional, sacrificial kind of togetherness that recognizes if we want to go fast, we go alone, but if we want to go far, we go together.

This wasn't just educational theory. This was survival strategy, passed down through generations.

When History Breaks Your Heart and Strengthens Your Soul

Standing at the slavery ports where our ancestors took their last baths on African soil broke something in me. But it also strengthened something deeper. Knowing what people who looked like me and bled like me endured made me want to work harder in everything I do. It made me want to show up even more for my community and for Black girls in education whose voices are often underrepresented and unheard.

Walking through the dungeons where Black people were kept while awaiting ships, seeing that churches were built right above those dungeons for European people to worship in their Sunday best while Black men and women lived in their own urine and feces, I wanted to scream at how inhumanely we can treat one another.

|| But Ghana taught me something else: we witness such injustice, we must pause and fight against it if we ever see it again.

The Lesson We're About to Miss

Here's what terrifies me: I fear that just as I almost missed the profound lessons right in front of me in Ghana by keeping my head buried in my laptop, we as a society are about to forget the biggest lesson of our time.

We are witnessing the enslavement and encampment of others happening again, right now, in broad daylight.

What's happening in Gaza today is a repetition of those dark histories I witnessed in Ghana. We're watching people be starved to death, not just physically from food, but mentally from their right to learn and use their own minds. By stopping aid from entering or remaining silent while harm is caused, we're allowing horrible histories to repeat themselves, but this time we're more aware.

When Education for All Is Put to the Test

This brings me to the hardest question my Ghana experience left me with: When we say "education for all," do we really mean it?

Because if we do, then we'd all take a stance against what's happening. We'd apply pressure in all the places we can and help get children, girls, and all people back in classrooms where they can learn without fear for their lives or violation of their human rights.

How do we begin to advocate for youth empowerment, girls' education, or zero education poverty when the freedoms of our fellow brothers and sisters in Palestine are being violated every hour of the day?

|| This isn't about politics, this is about the fundamental principle that every child deserves to learn without fear.

What Ghana Taught Me About Rebuilding

Ghana has rebuilt itself. It has reclaimed its history and continues to tell the story in hopes that those dark truths never become true again. Standing in that country, seeing what's possible when people refuse to let trauma have the final word, I learned what humanity is capable of at its ugliest, but also what can happen when we unite in love, understanding, and intentionality.

The same energy that rebuilt Ghana, that preserves these stories, that creates schools where children can learn their full history, that's the energy we need to bring to protecting education everywhere.

The Power in My Voice, The Responsibility in Ours

My trip to Ghana taught me where my power comes from: the sacrifices of those who came before me so that I could be a free Black woman existing in the world today. But with that freedom comes responsibility.

W.E.B. Du Bois didn't just advocate for Black education; he advocated for human dignity everywhere. Dr. Dillard didn't just build a school; she built a vision of what's possible when we center community and justice. Dr. Weiston-Serdan doesn't just mentor young people; she mentors them into understanding their global responsibility.

They taught me that my voice is only as powerful as my willingness to use it for all who are voiceless.

What It Takes to Protect What We Love

|| So I'm asking the same question Ghana asked me: What does it take to protect the things we love?

If we love education, we protect it everywhere, not just in the communities that look like ours or vote like us. If we believe in youth empowerment, we empower youth to speak against injustice wherever they see it. If we say education is a human right, then we defend that right even when it's inconvenient or uncomfortable.

The children in Gaza deserve the same right to education that I advocate for everywhere else. The families being displaced deserve the same dignity that my ancestors were denied. The young people living in fear deserve the same opportunities to dream that I fight for in every newsletter I write.

From Ghana to Global Responsibility

Ghana didn't just teach me about my history; it taught me about my responsibility to ensure that history's darkest chapters don't repeat themselves on my watch.

In your educational spaces, in your advocacy work, in your daily choices, how are you ensuring that "education for all" truly means all? How are you using your voice to protect not just the students in your immediate community, but all students whose right to learn is under threat?

Because ultimately, that's what education taught me in Ghana: we are only as free as the most oppressed among us. We can only claim victory for youth empowerment when every young person, everywhere, has the right to learn without fear.

Read, reflect, and let me know: How are you expanding your definition of "education for all" to truly include all?

This is Newsletter #7 in my ongoing series about youth empowerment and educational transformation. From the dungeons of Ghana to the classrooms of today the fight for education continues everywhere.