PROGRAMS

Everyone the world over lives with the consequences of traumatic upheavals, in the present, recent past, or from a time we did not actually live through. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to be in dialogue around our shared reality, and shared opportunity, to make a difference that matters to us, our families, communities, and world. Our programs engage diverse audiences in the process of designing bridges between their current realities and their unfulfilled dreams.

Terry with teacher Peter Clemm & his grade 5 students at Königin Luise Schule, November 2023

The Unerasure Projekt is cultivating a corps of conversation starters comprising descendants of Nazi victims, survivors, and refugees; perpetrators; and first, second, and third generation refugees. However different their experiences, they will have worked in depth with their ancestral and personal traumas and made a profound commitment to building bridges that connect past suffering to a healthy present and future for all people. Our learning program design is informed by The World Café, a powerful social technology that’s been successfully applied in diverse settings across the globe since 1995.

The initial seed that gave birth to The Unerasure Projekt was the Projektkurs Geschichte (history project course), developed by celebrated high school teacher Dirk Erkelenz in 2015. His aim was to give his students a hands-on experience of the Holocaust that would make this abstract horror from the receding past much more real and relevant to their present and future lives. Besides engaging with this difficult history in highly personal ways, his students also develop essential research science skills that will serve them throughout their lives. Students and descendants alike describe their interactions as life-changing, both gaining insight into what those who came before them lived through. These explorations and interactions naturally build empathy. When huge gaps in understanding are bridged between descendants of one-time enemies and generations of families, a new world is truly possible.

Herr Dr. Erkelenz has granted The Unerasure Projekt the privilege of sharing as widely as possible the pedagogy that he, an experienced history teacher and research scientist, developed for a public secondary school in Germany. We are adapting this material for teachers who may or may not have any prior training in research science. While we’re beginning in Germany, we’re committed to working with educators throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East where peoples’ lives were upended, if not ended, by WWII, and with teachers globally to shape an unerasure pedagogy relevant to their unique circumstances. Our intention is to present this curriculum in a way that teachers everywhere, whatever disruptions or devastation their students’ families may have experienced — whether in the distant past or in contemporary times — can easily adapt it for their own settings.

Our partnerships with government offices and non-governmental organizations advocate for policies and trauma-informed practices that promote unerasure, amplifying purpose, collaboration, and effectiveness. Our programs strengthen rapport between descendants and the agencies, governmental organizations, and NGOs committed to providing all the resources they can; unerasing false history and half-truths; and creating legal precedents regarding comprehensive historical accuracy. We position ourselves as allies rather than as adversaries, whether engaging local people and organizations to advocate for change in city governments or partnering with local, regional, and federal governmental bodies as consultants to help them review, write, and revise laws, policies, and practices to address the many insidious remnants of erasure. We offer learning programs around implicit bias and trauma renegotiation along with our advocacy for structural change.

Though The Unerasure Projekt is an emerging not-for-profit, its focus has been fundamental to our founder’s leadership mentoring, strategic consulting, and facilitation for decades. Our work with leaders and organizations is designed to illuminate the systemic erasures that deplete morale, block innovation, and depress profitability to shape workplaces that attract and retain top performers, fully engage the collaborative capacity of their people, and deliver on the promise of their visions.

This work can take many forms, including leadership development, strategic consulting, organizational redesign, team building, communications, DEI/implicit bias, and learning programs. Our best clients are leaders and companies who recognize the value in greater transparency. We’d be especially honored to work with those ready to examine how their companies’ WWII legacies may invisibly inform their present-day organizational cultures, business practices, and potential.

The arts play an essential role in unerasure and engage audiences in uniquely visceral ways. Our planned virtual museum will inspire, engage, and facilitate acts of unerasure. We envision curating galleries showcasing a wide range of creative expression — poetry, music, storytelling, visual art, monuments/memorials, films, plays, literature, investigative journalism, and more — and offering a variety of next steps for our global audience through interactive learning, engagement, and community building. We further anticipate transcending the virtual world by co-creating immersive experiences of unerasure with museum partners.