Today was Day 3 at Boston Teen Enrichment Camp. We started the morning with Channing’s workshop on American history, then sent the kids off along the Freedom Trail on a scavenger hunt. In the afternoon, we visited Cambridge City Hall for a meeting with the current mayor, Sumbul Siddiqui. And in the evening, we surprised our counselor Becky with a birthday celebration. Today I want to write about two things: why I designed the day this way, and what I actually saw as it unfolded.

Channing’s workshop on the American Revolution was brilliant. Not because she covered the dates, but because she made the past feel present.

She said: “Imagine you’re standing at your window when hundreds of warships suddenly appear in your harbor, filled with soldiers who have come to control you.”

She said: “A twelve-year-old boy, working at a wig shop, is shoved to the ground by a British soldier who refuses to pay.”

She said: “Five soldiers, surrounded by five hundred furious people. One soldier stumbles, his gun fires, and a sixteen-year-old boy falls.” Then she turned to our campers: “That boy was about your age.”

I watched their faces as she spoke. That is exactly the kind of history education I believe in. Not dates to memorize, but moments to feel. Channing turned the weight of a sixteen-year-old boy falling in 1770 into something these kids could carry in their own chests.

Then each camper received a scavenger hunt card, the group split into three teams, and they set off along the Freedom Trail’s red brick line to find traces of history:

• Find the burial ground of five American heroes
• Find the statue of the man on the $100 bill
• Find the golden lion and the golden unicorn
• Find the circular marker for the Boston Massacre
• Find Mother Goose’s grave
• Get a photo with someone in colonial-era costume
• Interview an out-of-state family: “What’s your favorite thing about Boston?”

I didn’t design this activity so they would memorize history facts. They’ll forget most of those within a week. I designed it for something simpler: to help them take a step outside of themselves and walk toward the world with curiosity.

The thing I wanted them to feel: courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s choosing to act even when you’re afraid.

Before we set off, I told them: “When you stand at the door of Park Street Church and awkwardly shout your team cheer, you’ll discover that the embarrassing thing happened — and the sky didn’t fall. When you walk up to a stranger and ask where they’re from, you’ll discover they’re genuinely friendly. You’ll discover that this world is not as scary as you imagined. You can move through it freely.”

Watching them go from “too shy to speak” to “charging ahead to find the next clue” — a few of them walked up to costumed re-enactors with small, careful steps. But they came bouncing back, buzzing with what the person had said, where they were from, what they’d talked about.

I hope they felt it: this world is not as frightening as they thought.

Every year for ten years, we have brought our campers to Cambridge City Hall. This is the one activity I never drop.

Why?

When I first came to America, I lived in Cambridge. What moved me most about America wasn’t its buildings, its universities, or its technology. It was its transparency. I could push open the door of City Hall and walk in. I could sit in on a city council meeting. I could email the mayor and get a real reply. That feeling — that government is a place I can enter at any time — was something I had never experienced before.

So when I designed this camp, I wanted our campers to feel it firsthand: how American government actually works, how elected officials actually serve their residents, what it means for a public space to truly belong to the public.

Over the years, we’ve met several Cambridge mayors. Each one has given our kids a civics lesson they’ll carry for a long time.

One year, Mayor Marc McGovern brought out from the archives an original copy of the Declaration of Independence — the actual document, from 1776. The campers stood close and saw the real paper. Their eyes went wide.

Another year, Mayor E. Denise Simmons spent three full hours running our campers through an entire mock city council session. They played council members, they played the mayor, they played ordinary citizens. Simmons walked them through every step: how to open a session, how a council member formally raises a motion, how the chair runs the discussion, how decisions get made. It wasn’t a lecture — it was an immersive democracy simulation.

This year, we visited the current mayor, Sumbul Siddiqui. This is her third term. I first met her during the pandemic — I came to donate masks, and a group of volunteers brought boxes of supplies to City Hall. She opened the door herself. I still remember her figure, not very tall, holding the city steady through a war with no battlefield.

She is the first Muslim woman to serve as Cambridge mayor. She welcomed our campers into her meeting chamber and talked with them for a long time.

She shared the three issues Cambridge City Council cares about most: housing, education, and economic mobility.

On housing: Cambridge is only 6.6 square miles. Not much land, a lot of people. “Where can we build more housing while protecting small businesses?” is a permanent conversation. They use zoning laws to manage building heights — policy tools for the question of how public land can be shared most fairly among everyone.

On education: she has led two projects that particularly moved me. Universal Pre-K, which extends free preschool to 4-year-olds; and an Early College Program that lets high school students earn college credits before they graduate. She told us she had looked at the data and found that many Cambridge kids start college but can’t finish because of cost. Her solution wasn’t simply more financial aid — it was shortening the path and cutting the price of completion by starting college-level work in high school.

She gave a just-happened example that made democracy suddenly concrete for the kids. Cambridge was planning a new school soccer field. Staff recommended artificial turf — cheaper, easier to maintain. The community pushed back on environmental grounds. Citizens who had never come to a council meeting before showed up and spoke publicly. The decision was changed to natural grass. She said: “This was a topic I never expected to take so much time. But public participation actually changed our decision.”

She also told us how she got here. At twelve years old, she and her classmates started a Youth Council in their community, advocating to lower the voting age from 18 to 17. That Youth Council is still running today. She studied Public Policy in college, then law school, did Legal Aid work providing free legal assistance to residents, ran for city council in 2017, and is now in her third term as mayor. What she shared with the kids wasn’t “I was born for this” — it was: “Since I was twelve, I’ve been asking how to make my community better, and I just kept doing that.”

Both of our Youth Counselors were asking questions throughout.

Sharon asked one that I deeply admired: “As a woman in a room full of portraits of former male mayors — what gets you out of bed every morning?” She didn’t treat the meeting as a checkbox. She asked something genuinely connected to who this mayor is and what she carries every day. Mayor Siddiqui paused, then said: “The community. Being able to help people in different ways. Just today, a resident told me she was grateful I was willing to open my door and talk through her concerns — because no one else had given her that chance. It’s these small things that make me want to keep doing this.”

Alan asked from a different angle: “What experiences growing up pushed you toward public service? Was it student organizations?” Not “did you always want to be mayor” — but “what specifically did you go through to get here?” Alan also asked about Cambridge’s bike lanes, whether you need to be a lifelong Cambridge resident to run for council, and who the people sitting beside the mayor actually are and what they do. The mayor answered every single one seriously, and said “That’s a great question” more than once.

Before we went in, I asked the campers to hold three questions in their minds throughout the meeting.

First: Cambridge City Hall is open to anyone — enter, look around, sit in on meetings, even stand up and speak publicly. What does that mean?

Second: We are visitors from overseas, with no vote and no residency in Cambridge. Yet the mayor spent time warmly welcoming us and answering every question our kids asked. What does that tell you?

Third: When we walk freely into this chamber, sit down, and could even sit in the mayor’s chair for a photo — what do you feel?

When Chinese people first started traveling to America, it was because America was the most advanced country in the world. The feeling was that America had things China didn’t, or that everything here was simply more developed.

A decade ago, when the first cohort of our campers visited the Boston Science Museum, their eyes lit up. They were seeing things they’d never seen at home — fresh, stunning.

That’s completely different now. China today — especially in its major cities — leads America in many aspects of infrastructure, modern living, and applied technology. Our kids ride the subway, and China’s is newer, faster, cleaner. They go to restaurants where scanning to order has been standard for years. They look at city skylines, and many Chinese cities at night are more dramatic than Boston.

So what are our kids coming to America to see? What are they here to feel? Why does this remain a place that so many choose to study?

This is a question I’ve been sitting with throughout ten-plus years of running Boston TEC and helping students with university applications.

Here, our campers see:

• How a government keeps its door open so every citizen can walk in and speak
• How a Muslim woman mayor sits steadily at the center of her chamber, beneath portraits of all the men who came before her
• How 250-year-old history becomes the red brick line beneath your feet, the portraits on the chamber walls, every debate still happening in council today
• How a stranger on the street looks at you, greets you, gives you directions without a second thought
• How the weight of a twelve-year-old boy pushed down in 1770 can still make people stop and honor his memory in this country’s shared story

Our campers come to America to see what kind of mental infrastructure can hold a country together — in the ordinary, every day. They find part of the answer in how government works, part of it in how officials and residents actually relate to each other, part of it in how history is remembered and told and walked through, part of it in a glance and a greeting between strangers on the street.

The picture these answers form is different for every kid. None of the answers is the standard one. But every answer goes further than “the robots at the Boston Science Museum were so cool.”

Today was our counselor Becky’s birthday. After dinner, we quietly brought out a local ice cream cake. We sang together — the room filled with laughter. We’d spent all day pretending we’d forgotten. The kids had each sneaked off at some point to prepare their own gifts and cards. A full American-style surprise party.

Beautiful Becky — happy birthday.

Time with these kids is always so easy, always so warm.