Listen now:
Jodie Pope leads the Gateway to College program at Madison College, which serves students on the verge of leaving high school, or who already have. This week, Angela sits down with her to talk about what changes when you build an educational space around being seen instead of sorted.
The conversation moves from the practical to the profound: why relational trust is the whole game, how our schools became so transactional, and what it means that “half of our players aren’t in the game.” Jodie is disarmingly honest about her first day running the program, about parenting a teenager, and about the day she interviewed a biracial 17-year-old at her own former high school and found herself talking to a younger version of herself. What she got to tell that student, she says, was life-changing for both of them.
This season of Black Oxygen is about community and collective care as resistance — and Jodie is learning, in real time, to receive the community she’s spent a lifetime giving to others.
