March 9-13 is Jesuit’s annual Social Justice Week, where Jesuit provides keynotes, assemblies, and workshops to inform the student body about a common theme regarding social justice. This year’s theme: identity.
Throughout the week, students will attend a variety of student led workshops to learn more about different parts of identity within social justice.
But what exactly is a social justice workshop and what goes on behind the scenes to make these workshops happen?
To even begin creating a workshop, “They complete a form where they share their title, their description, who they’re presenting with, and then after that, usually anybody who applies is in and they get paired with a mentor or teacher to help them, and support them through the process of building a workshop," assistant DEI director Ms. Cruz said.
“Students are added to a Canvas course where they have to turn in assignments to make sure they’re on track for their workshop,” she said.
Ms. Cruz described how to get started with the workshop process, but what planning goes into the creation of the workshop once you have been approved?
Juniors, Sara Thakurta and Maggie Colley, are presenting a workshop on beauty standards within society, which they have been preparing and working on for the last month and a half.
”We go over goals, objectives, context, experience, reflection, and action and then a little closure. And basically once a week, we go meet our teacher and run all of our progress by her.”
“There’s a lot of statistics and data for what we need to collect to back up what we are saying in our activities," Sara described.
These junior workshop leaders were inspired to pick their topic for many different reasons. First off, they did this workshop last year and wanted the ability to continue to share it and build upon what they learned previously. They also wanted to be able to have a platform where they could share some of the critical issues within beauty standards in our current society, especially with women, and open people’s eyes to this issue.
There are over 30 workshops to choose from over Social Justice Week and a huge majority of those workshops are student led.
Ms. Cruz described the importance of workshops being student led saying, “It’s both helpful for students to have that experience of what it’s like to teach about a certain topic, and a lot of the topics that students decide to present on, they’re topics that they're really passionate about or that they already have experience in.”
”And so to be able to share that with your peers is just really important, because it shows that you know your voice matters, that you’re capable of leadership,” she said.
Jesuit kicks off their sixth annual Social Justice week on Monday, March 9th 2026, with workshops and keynotes throughout the week, as well as the spectacular Community Celebration Assembly on Thursday, March 12th 2026.
