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Today's speaker was Tascha Just, a new member of the Mounds View School Board.  Tascha is a Minnesota-based school psychologist and the founder of SEL Academy, where she helps schools and communities build trauma-responsive and neurodiversity-affirming systems.  She is president of the MN School Psychologists Association and an appointee to Minnesota's Children's Justice Ace Task Force.  She grew up in a military family and describes herself as neurodivergent, having had a number of concussions and brain injuries.  Her primary focus is to help foster resilience in students.  

Today's speaker was Tea Rozmann who leads a local organization known as "Green Card Voices", a Minneapolis based, nationally growing non profit that connects immigrants and their communities through multimedia storytelling. They record the first person narratives of immigrants, and publish them in books, online and in traveling exhibits. So far they have recorded the stories of over 500 immigrants and refugees who are originally from over 140 countries and who now reside in Minnesota, New York, New Jersey, California, North Dakota, Georgia and Wisconsin.  Ms. Rozmann emigrated to the U.S. from Slovenia.  Their perspective is one that views immigration as being most successful when it is approached as a "potluck" vs. a "melting pot" - meaning that preserving and sharing aspects of the culture of their home countries is better for all than expecting all to become fully homogeneous.  Currently, about 15% of the U.S. population is foreign born.