Rise Up for Students is a community-driven writing and advocacy project grounded in racial equity, environmental justice, radical empathy, and the belief that confronting injustice directly is a prerequisite for building schools—and communities—rooted in dignity and care.

Founded in 2016 by Matt Halvorson, the blog advocates for a better life for all kids while confronting racial, social, and structural injustice in our schools. While much of the work is rooted in Seattle and Washington State, the questions it raises—about power, responsibility, harm, and care—extend well beyond any single place.

Rise Up for Students approaches education as inseparable from the broader systems that shape people’s lives. Its work centers racial equity, environmental justice, and abolitionist values, while pushing for bolder, more justice-centered decision-making from those in positions of authority. Just as importantly, it asks all of us—educators, parents, and community members—to examine our own role within the systems we move through and benefit from.

Beginning in 2018, Matt partnered with Marcus Harden to create Black History Today, an annual series released each February that honors the living legacy of Black history by lifting up unsung leaders, elders, artists, educators, and community builders. The project later expanded beyond the blog as History Lives Here, exhibited at the Northwest African American Museum, carrying the work into shared civic space.

Over the years, Rise Up for Students has featured writing from a wide range of local voices, including Stephan Blanford, Marcus Harden, Amanda Williams, Erin Jones and Marcus Harrison Green and other parents, activists, students and educators.

After a period of hiatus in 2023, the work continues with renewed clarity and resolve. We remain grounded in the belief that education is one branch of a much larger tree of inequity—and that justice requires more than reform at the margins. Rise Up for Students exists to challenge systems of oppression, confront injustice directly, and stand unapologetically with students and communities working toward something freer, safer, and more humane.

Rise Up for Students contributors

You can also find Rise Up For Students on Facebook and on Instagram @RiseUpForStudents. But honestly, nobody really checks those accounts very often. Not at the moment anyway.

Feel free to send Matt an email.

We acknowledge that we live on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples. We give life to that acknowledgment through a commitment to ongoing learning, brave solidarity and intentional decolonization.