BCCJ InIt - secrecy and ambiguity

I would talk about what happened during the Boston Center for Community Justice (BCCJ) Leadership Initiative (InIt), but I can't, because that would ruin it for any future youth who want to take part in it and stumble across this. Each of us staff members was given a schedule as well as outlines of the workshops we were to run. When I told the executive director that I couldn't find it, it suddenly became top priority to find it and make sure it didn't fall into the hands of the students. That's how serious BCCJ is about keeping this stuff, secret. It's for effect. How else could we have evoked so much pain and anger? Tears and suffering? Reflection and healing? If the students knew what was up? That's BCCJ's stance. I personally don't know much about that. Needless to say, the students left transformed, and that is my only fear about this program. It takes them for a week, exposes their own internalized oppressive modes of thought in relation to society, and then throws them back out hoping to make change in their communities. A beautiful and positive way to describe it is that we planted seeds of positive change in their minds, and hopefully this will spread to their communities, and cultivate a more socially just society.

What I wonder is, was it a good thing to affect such huge dramatic change in each individual? Built off the ashes of trauma? Did it have to be so rapid and emotional? Will there be psychological damage? But perhaps the psychological damage can be weighed against the psychological healing?

I'm back at UAlbany now, back into the soul-less jargon of academia, and I'm feeling really stale about it.