Georgia Center for the Book and the First Baptist Church of Decatur Present Luma Mufleh - Learning America
Join the Georgia Center for the Book and First Baptist Church of Decatur for another in program in the Conversations at First Baptist series featuring activist and Fugees Family founder Luma Mufleh.
Mufleh will be discussing her new book “Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children,” which tells the visionary leader’s powerful personal story and lays a blueprint for change that will inspire schools and communities across America.
This free event will be in person at First Baptist Church Decatur, in the sanctuary. A Cappella Books will have signed copies available for purchase at the venue.
Registration is required to reserve your seat.
Seating is general admission. To ensure the safety of our speaker and guests, proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours prior to the event will be required to enter the venue. Masks are required.
About the Book
Luma Mufleh—a Muslim woman, a gay refugee from hyper-conservative Jordan—joins a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia and Afghanistan and Sudan, have attended local schools for years. Drawn in as coach of a ragtag but fiercely competitive team, Mufleh discovers that few of her players can read a word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?”
For readers of Malala, Paul Tough, and Bryan Stevenson, “Learning America” is the moving and insight-packed story of how Luma Mufleh grew a soccer team into a nationally acclaimed network of schools—by homing in laserlike on what traumatized students need in order to learn.
Fugees Family accepts only those most in need: students recruit other students, and all share a background of war, poverty, and trauma. No student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Most foundational, everyone takes art and music and everyone plays soccer, areas where students make the leaps that can and must happen—as this gifted refugee activist convinces—even for America’s most left-behind.
About the Author
Luma Mufleh is the founder of Fugees Family, with schools now in Georgia and Ohio and an expanding footprint bringing educational equity to refugee resettlement communities across America. Her TED Talk on educational justice for refugee families was viewed more than 1.7 million times.
