Adam F.C. Fletcher

01/06/2026

(6 of 6) By the Numbers: For 28 years, I have been partnering with organizations to move engaging people—including youth, Black people, parents, low-income people, workers, unhoused people, and others—from the margins to the center of democracy. I KEEP GOING.

[PIC: This is me in Grade 2. This is the guy I always imagine my work could be helping. Its never been missionary work - it has always been about helping my own self and people like me.]

01/05/2026

(5 of 6) By the Numbers: In 2025, I reached approximately 2,500,000 people through the ecosystems I worked in with K-12 education, community based nonprofits, government agencies, international NGOs, higher education and beyond around the world.

[PIC: This is my first formal event for 2026, but reflects one of the ways how I got to reach so many people last year!]

01/05/2026

(4 of 6) By the Numbers: l81%—At the European Union conference I keynoted for the GroundUP Project, 81% of participants rated the quality of my speech as "Excellent.”

[PIC: This is the cover to the publication I wrote related to the GroundUP Project in the EU in 2025.]

01/04/2026

(4 of 6) By the Numbers: Sometimes I find myself craving data, and I here is one of the best outcomes for the work I did in 2025: 81%—At the European Union conference I keynoted for the GroundUP Project, 81% of participants rated the quality of my speech as "Excellent.”

[PIC: This is the cover to the publication I wrote related to the GroundUP Project in the EU in 2025.]

01/03/2026

(3 of 6) By the Numbers: 530—In 2025, I facilitated 10 hours of high-impact learning activities totaling a cumulative 530 person-hours of learning to 240 diverse participants.

[PIC: This is a gathering in Reggio Emilia, Italy, that I coordinated in October 2025.]

01/03/2026

I stand strong against the wholesale derision of young people and their generation today. The ongoing fearmongering, defamation, and slander against children and youth are nothing more than the eons-long continuation of adultism asserting its domination, manipulation and absolute power by talking bad about those who will inevitably replace us.

[Image: This colorized 1914 pic shows young men outside the Fort Street Special School for Incorrigible Boys once located in Omaha, Nebraska.]

01/02/2026

(2 of 6) By the Numbers: Sometimes I find myself craving data, and I here is another one of the best outcomes for the work I did in 2025: 250,000—The number of pages I completed writing in 2025 for new publications, including Youth and e-Democracy, A History of African Americans in Nebraska (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/truth/2/), and a few other publications.

[PIC: Here is cover of one of the several publications I had published in 2025, A Beginner's Guide to North Omaha History.]

01/01/2026

(1 of 6) By the Numbers: Sometimes I find myself craving data, and I here is one of the best outcomes for the work I did in 2025: 120 active participants from 14 EU Member States listened to my keynote at the GroundUP Project Final Conference in Austria in September. My keynote on youth and e-democracy was cited as the most valuable component of the event, and one of the explicitly stated "Next Steps" for the project is to disseminate my new e-book, Youth and e-Democracy (https://adamfletcher.net/2025/09/17/youth-engagement-in-e-democracy/), to all partners.

[PIC: Here I'm standing in a portico in Bologna, Italy, in October 2025. I was fortunate enough to travel to 5 different countries for work in 2025, too!]

12/16/2025

AWESOME! Wendy Lesko has made the BEST summary of the best 25 tools from 2025 related to youth infusion, including youth voice, engagement, empowerment and more. AND she included my e-book from last year! https://youthinfusion.org/sign-up-for-25-must-have-free-youth-infusion-resources/

Simply fill in this form and you will receive the “Top 25” to open 25 doors and learn about 5 Youth Infusion trends. All for FREE! (Your information will not be shared with anyone.)

12/08/2025

This TREMENDOUS feedback arrived yesterday from Europe, where I keynoted on youth and e-democracy this fall. See the source and learn about the conference and project athttps://www.sdruzenisplav.cz/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/GroundUp_Publication_compressed.pdf

12/04/2025

“Standing on the shoulders…”? More like sitting in dialog…

Paulo Freire sat in a small church classroom in Recife in 1962 watching sugarcane workers learn to read by writing their own lives on chalkboards because he believed no nation could call itself free while its poorest citizens were kept illiterate on purpose.
Brazil’s elite called the workers unteachable. Some politicians openly said literacy for the poor would threaten the existing social order. Freire saw a different truth. He built his method on conversation rather than memorization. He wrote words like “land,” “hunger,” and “work” on a board because those were the words that shaped their days. Within forty five days, three hundred laborers who had been treated as invisible citizens were reading, writing, and debating the laws that governed their lives.
Success created backlash. Local officials warned that “dangerous ideas” were spreading. Landowners complained that educated workers would demand rights. Freire refused to soften his approach. He met students under trees, in abandoned shacks, in borrowed rooms. He taught them that literacy was not just letters. It was power. When one worker said he felt “born again” after reading his first sentence, Freire wrote the moment in his notebook and called it proof that education must begin with human dignity.
Then came 1964. A military coup seized Brazil. The new regime declared Freire’s work subversive. Soldiers raided classrooms and confiscated books. Freire was arrested and interrogated for seventy days. They accused him of stirring rebellion. He answered that teaching people to read was an act of respect, not revolt.
Exile followed. First Bolivia, then Chile, then Geneva. Everywhere he went, Freire carried the same notebooks filled with sketches of lessons, quotes from students, and questions he believed every teacher should ask. Nations invited him to rebuild literacy programs. Universities studied his methods. In 1970 he published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that challenged educators to treat students as partners rather than empty vessels. Critics attacked his ideas as radical. Teachers around the world embraced them as liberation.
When Freire finally returned to Brazil after sixteen years of exile, thousands of former students greeted him. Many were leaders, organizers, and teachers themselves. They told him his lessons had outlived the dictatorship that tried to silence them.
Paulo Freire did not treat education as a classroom subject.
He treated it as a pathway to freedom, and he proved that a single chalkboard can shift the balance of power in a society.

11/26/2025

ALL of us…