Kara May is Executive Director of Arts & Partnerships and Founding Principal at Art In Motion Creative Arts School. She is also an Educational Partner with FREE TO DREAM™, where she helps cultivate not only Dreamers but Dreamkeepers—adults who create the conditions for young people to dream, belong, and thrive
This summer, the same question kept finding me.
It found me while visioning with colleagues at Art In Motion and FREE TO DREAM™. I carried it into planning sessions with leaders reimagining the future of learning and work. It surfaced again while presenting at national conferences, sat with me around the table of an advisory board imagining a new arts school in New York, and came alive again through conversations with community partners here in Chicago.
Different cities. Different organizations. Different missions.
Yet somehow, we kept arriving at the same place:
How do we prepare students for careers that don’t yet exist? How do we ensure every young person has access to meaningful opportunity? How do we redesign learning for a rapidly changing world? How do we teach young people to dream of a world they do not yet have access to?
These are worthy questions. They deserve our best thinking, our best research, and our best collaboration. Yet, this summer in particular, I found myself leaving those conversations with a different question:
What kind of adults do our children deserve?
For over three decades, I have had the privilege of serving in education. During that time, I have learned that while systems matter — and they do — systems don’t love children.
People do.
Children don’t experience education as a strategic plan or initiative; they experience it through relationships.
They remember the teacher who believed in them before they believed in themselves. The mentor who refused to let them quit. The coach who saw potential they couldn’t yet see. The artist who awakened a gift.
Long after the details fade, they remember the people. Because eventually, every decision reaches a child through an adult.
I’ve never believed this was solely the work of educators. Much of my life’s work has been shaped by the deep, abiding belief that children flourish when entire communities embrace them. What surprised me this summer wasn’t discovering that conviction; it was hearing it echoed back to me.
Whether I was with professionals from every corner of the work or community members alike, beneath every conversation was the same quiet truth: no one can do this work alone — not schools, not organizations, and not single programs.
One moment brought that truth into especially clear focus.
On Juneteenth, through a partnership between the school at which I serve, Art In Motion, and Guitars Over Guns, two of our students had the opportunity to perform during the opening of the historic Obama Presidential Center. I watched their performance from afar with enormous pride and later had the joy of celebrating with them at a reception hosted by Guitars Over Guns.
As I looked around the room, I realized the celebration wasn’t simply about what those students had accomplished that day. It was about everything that made that day possible: teachers, teaching artists, families, community partners — all people who had quietly and sometimes loudly — invested their time, encouragement, expertise, and belief over months and years.
Their performance of Better Believe with rock legend Eddie Vedder was extraordinary, but what moved me most was the community behind it.
And that’s when it hit me: this is what a village looks like.
Not everyone doing the same work. Everyone faithfully carrying a piece of it.
Many of the conversations I participated in this summer centered on innovation, and rightly so. Our children deserve schools that are creative, relevant, and connected to the future they will inherit — and the future they will build.
Innovation matters. Artificial intelligence matters. Curriculum matters. Partnerships matter. All of these are essential.
But children — they are the destination. Everything else is how we help them get there.
As another school year begins, I don’t find myself overflowing with excitement. I find myself cautiously optimistic.
The more I understand what is possible, the more I understand what it takes — and what is at stake. That realization is both sobering and beautiful. It is sobering because every decision we make either expands or narrows what children believe is possible. It is beautiful because I have seen what happens when adults choose to carry that responsibility — together.
This summer didn’t change what I believe. It clarified it.
So, what kind of adults do our children deserve?
They deserve adults who understand that children are never someone else’s responsibility.
They deserve adults who are willing to lend belief before children can find it on their own.
They deserve adults who understand that while none of us can do everything, each of us can faithfully carry the piece of the work that is ours.
In short, they deserve adults who live as though every child has been entrusted to them. Because children learn what we model.
Before they believe in themselves, they borrow belief from us. They discover what is possible by watching what we make possible. They learn to dream of worlds they have never seen because adults first choose to live as though those worlds are, in fact, possible.
Perhaps that has always been the work.
Our children were never entrusted to schools alone. They were entrusted to us.