Student Leadership Conference
Who We Are Shapes the Change We Make:
Redefining Community through Culture
Friday, March 6th, 2026
Last year’s inaugural conference included nearly 100 participants from 10 Bay Area high schools, and participants from as far away as Santa Rosa and Sacramento. Students built connections across schools, facilitated community conversations on inclusion and belonging, and engaged in action planning in school cohorts to develop strategies for making their school communities more responsive to students’ needs. Working intergenerationally in small groups, participants in this year’s conference will strengthen a sense of their own identity to build bridges across differences and initiate inclusive, transformative culture in their schools. Students will participate in dialogue and artistic activities while learning about and practicing identity-based affinity group work that connects them with themselves, each other, and across schools. Adult chaperones will engage in cross-school dialogue and action planning alongside their student cohorts.
Opening Keynote Speaker:
Patrick Camangian, PhD is a professor of Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. Patrick’s interdisciplinary research on humanizing education intersects critical and culturally relevant pedagogy, critical literacy, and health science research. Patrick pursues these areas of research to improve teacher quality, capacity, and retention, as well as to inform policies and practices impacting urban schools and communities. He has been working in schools since 1997, continuing in the tradition of teacher action research, applying cutting-edge pedagogies in schools, and more recently, informing district-wide policy and practice through social design research and collaborations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Closing Keynote Speaker:
Austin Willacy is a community organizer who uses music as a tool for peacebuilding with a focus on environmental, racial, and gender justice. He is an award-winning singer/songwriter with 4 CDs and 3 EPs to his name and a veteran member of The House Jacks, a pioneering a cappella group with whom he has produced 10 full-length albums and completed multiple world tours.
Austin is all about connections: connecting people across social and political divides, connecting audiences with new forms of music and art, and connecting local inequalities to broader systems of injustice. Through song, dialogue, and play, Austin helps communities ‘connect the dots’ between theory and practice, conflict and peace, ecology and culture. He has served as a facilitator in places like Turkey, India, and Israel and Palestine, using his unique blend of activism and musicianship to inspire relationship-building and collaborative action.
Austin was awarded the 2023-2024 EnPax Arts Fellowship and shared his work at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in The Hague. Austin has won 8 Positive Music Awards for his songwriting and has performed with icons such as Bonnie Raitt and the Doobie Brothers as well as Jem, Vienna Teng, Rachael Yamagata and Amos Lee.
Austin organizes and facilitates Jams for YES! YES! Jams are events that help individual changemakers deepen their root system, and grow in consciousness and self-care, so they can become healthier and more effective, and restore balance and well-being. He is a veteran member of the North America Jam and one of the co-founders of the Black Diaspora Jam, the Men Raised as Men Jam, and the Arts for Social Change Jams in the US, Turkey, and India.
Austin is the co-Artistic Director of the Thrive Choir, an Oakland-based group that was born to sing a vision of connection, healing, and justice into being. For the past 28 years, Austin has directed ‘Til Dawn, Youth in Arts’ award-winning teen a cappella group that empowers youth to find their voices in many ways. Inspired by his youth work, the Apple Store in San Francisco hired him to do an Apple Music Lab on Finding Your Creative Voice and Songwriting Basics on the iPad.
Conference Day Schedule:
Conference: 11am-4pm*
(*Registration opens at 10am. Please arrive no later than 10:30am.)
Break: 4:15-6:15pm
(Enjoy free time with your school group during the break, or join us for a film and popcorn.)
Evening social gathering sponsored by The Bay School: 6:30-9pm
San Francisco Waldorf High School, 470 West Portal Ave.
Join us at the Second Annual San Francisco Student Leadership Conference!
San Francisco Waldorf High School is excited to be offering a three-year Student Leadership Conference (SLC) series in collaboration with Alma Partners. On March 6th, 2026, we will host our second annual SLC and hope we can include your school. SLC 2026 is open to high-school and middle-school students.
Conference Goals
- Create a space where student leaders can dialogue honestly across differences and adult supporters can model engaged, responsive leadership
- Build students’ confidence, sense of belonging, facilitation skills, and leadership capacity
- Develop cross-school networks that empower youth and center their voices
Register Now!
We are excited to welcome you to the 2026 Student Leadership Conference! Below are the three different ways you are able to register for this event. The registration fee is $150 per person. If you are interested Sponsoring this event, please email SLC@sfwaldorf.org for more information or see information below.
If you have any questions, please email SLC@sfwaldorf.org. We look forward to welcoming you to a day of reflection, inspiration, and action!
Sponsorship
School Sponsors
Sponsorship gives schools the ability to send a delegation and:
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Send a student cohort to a student facilitator training on Zoom prior to the conference (high schools)
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Receive recognition in conference publicity materials, social media posts, and signage
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Sponsor a space or event at the conference, such as affinity group sponsor, lunch sponsor or quiet space sponsor
School sponsorship is $5000 per school and includes all the perks above in addition to sending a delegation to the conference (10 middle-school students or 10 high-school students and two adult chaperones to the conference).
Click the "Become a Sponsor" button below to register as a school sponsor.
Business and Community Sponsors
Support young people and raise your organization's visibility! Click the button below to see sponsorship levels, ranging from $500-10,000.
A look back at the Inaugural 2025 Conference
2025 Keynote Speaker:
Dr. Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton is a Black mother, scholar, and Clinical Associate in Stanford’s Teacher Education Program (STEP). She is the co-founder of Making Us Matter and a co-founding editor of The Black Educology Mixtape (Journal), a collective dedicated to advancing transformative education and promoting liberation and visibility for Black communities. Her scholarship focuses on the construction of interlocking identities by investigating the intersections of race, identity, and education. She has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Equity & Excellence in Education, and Race Ethnicity and Education. Her current work centers Black educational studies, Black methodologies, and critical pedagogy. With over 16 years of experience in education, her writing, teaching, and research meet at the intersections.
