Students can sign up for the upcoming Becoming Racially Aware and Valuing Ethnicity conference before this Friday. 

For this year’s BRAVE conference, which will be held April 12 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., students can engage in open discussions, hear from three guest speakers, participate in workshops and watch unique performances centered around this year’s conference theme, Uniting Through Unity.

The BRAVE conference is a day dedicated to delving into cultural and ethnic topics at Lab and around the world. Inspired by incidents involving discrimination at Lab this year, the BRAVE committee decided to host workshops and have discussions on how to move forward and prevent these occurrences in the future.

“We saw the soccer team unite after facing racial discrimination, we saw BSA lead the walk out, we saw the numerous posters put up all over lockers,” senior Kavan Puri, co-president of the committee, said. “We felt that we’ve seen a lot of movements within the school and we thought it would be interesting to look at the ways that these movements, not only within Lab, have impacted us even after they’ve ended.” 

The conference will offer a variety of unique workshops that includes learning about Vietnamese culture through cooking, creating a mural, discussing the importance of people of color and youth involvement in politics through voting simulators, and more. The BRAVE committee urges students who wish to learn about new perspectives and cultural roots to sign up for the conference and attend with open minds and hearts.  

“We think that the benefit that BRAVE has is that everyone that’s there wants to be there, and they really dedicate themselves to these conversations,” Kavan said. “It’s a place to just be vulnerable, and share your experiences.”