By Karen Blumenfeld
For six evenings from October 2025 and April 2026, groups of community members put that self-description to the test.
The Conversations for Change series, held in the Round Room of the Wayland Free Public Library, was facilitated by Dr. Eden-Reneé Hayes, social psychologist, Wayland resident, and founder and CEO of Pluralism Solutions. Each session paired a pre-reading with guided conversation and a push toward identifying concrete next steps. The connecting thread, Hayes notes, is that “great intentions do not ensure great outcomes. We must self-reflect and grow… together.”
The series, which was jointly sponsored by the library, the Wayland Museum and Historical Society, and the Human Rights, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, opened with George Washington’s farewell address, his unheeded warnings about political factionalism. The second session drew on Heather McGhee’s ”The Sum of Us” to examine our segregated communities, and what that costs all of us. The third session, “Toward a More Welcoming Wayland,” turned the lens locally, asking participants to examine their social circles and assumptions through the lens of the Wayland Community Life and Engagement Executive Report.
In the fourth session, “Reckoning With Our Past, Repairing Our Future,” participants grappled with uncomfortable elements of Wayland’s past, including minstrel shows performed in a Wayland church, and a cross burning in Wayland in the 1980s. Artifacts from the Wayland Museum, including minstrel show playbills, sparked discussion about how we absorb stereotypes in our everyday lives.
The series was planned as four sessions but expanded to six. The fifth session drew on James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” to probe the difference between a community that tolerates difference and one that welcomes it. The sixth used the McCarthy-era targeting of Paul Robeson to examine how fear was used to sort people into acceptable and dangerous categories, and how it still is used that way.
“The idea of who gets to belong, and who gets to decide, is a big idea that I never thought about in this way,” said participant Steve Greer.
In a moment when the national appetite for racial reckoning seems to be diminishing, a community that gathers month after month to look at itself in the mirror is doing something worth noticing.
“This topic is fraught with emotion both positive and negative,” said participant Marie Isenburg. “It is essential to realizing the promise of this country. It’s worth pursuing.”
Brave spaces, Hayes insists, are not endpoints. They are starting points.
This series was made possible by the Gossels Fund for Human Dignity, the Marian Draper Fund, and the Friends of the Wayland Library. It was funded in part by a grant from the Wayland Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
