By Stuart Comstock-Gay and Paul Herdman
Inspired by Black History Month and our unwavering desire to address structural and systemic racism in Delaware and beyond, the Delaware Community Foundation and Rodel are proud to sponsor the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund.
This initiative aims to highlight black voices in our community. Through nominations, the program provides strong, imaginative Black leaders with a financial award to use their voice and solutions for building a fair, equitable, and anti-racist America that better reflects the best of humanity.
Through this partnership, a person from Delaware will be selected as a leader.
Wes Moore, the bestselling author of Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City, co-chairs the fund. Moore spoke to the DCF and our friends during a 2020 “Building Opportunity” keynote.
Click here to learn more about the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, and click here to nominate a Black leader from your community. The deadline to submit nominations is March 15.
Archive for race
It’s time to lean into a new normal. If ever a year required us to re-think how things have been done, it’s this one. And the renewed reckoning on racial equity in America is most certainly part of that new normal.
We at the DCF have been deeply focused on Covid response work over the past nine months. During this time, we’ve also reflected more deeply on the growing Black Lives Matter movement, and protests and organizing across the nation. We had the chance to welcome Wes Moore and to engage hundreds of Delawareans in discussions about the deep history of racial inequality, and the need that all of us be part of building a society that is inclusive and equitable.
A big part of how we at the DCF are working on these issues starts with what we learned from the Community Equity Project cohort, a group of Delaware leaders – people with experience addressing equity issues – who met for over a year to define a shared vision around racial equity. We are pleased to release the report of recommendations from this cohort, which will help us continue driving important conversations statewide.
Out of that group’s work, there are six commitments the DCF is making now and for the long-term:
• Make racial equity an explicit priority in all the work of the DCF.
• Increase the impact of resources invested in the community that focus on racial equity.
• Encourage civic discourse – spark conversations throughout Delaware on racial equity issues.
• Shine a light on research and data through our communications channels and events.
• Continue to bring together and rely on the expertise of the Community Equity Project cohort to move the work forward and build broader partnerships.
Those five bullets are only the beginning, and only scratch the surface of course. They have led to specific actions. A new board equity committee – chaired by former federal Judge Greg Sleet – is meeting to develop metrics and resources for the work. Our Wes Moore Building Opportunity event is leading to continued community conversation about how and where Delawareans can engage in this work. We will be launching a new grants program focused on organizations led by people of color. We will be working with consultants to review our own practices – organization-wide – to ensure we are implementing the best practices to ensure perspectives of people of color are represented, heard and honored.
It’s also only the beginning of our work. We know that over time, work on racial equity issues will evolve, improve, and change. And we are committed to being in this work for the long haul.
I also want to thank and honor the people who participated in the Community Equity Project cohort, who are helping lead us to these changes. They are: Daniel Atkins, Rosa Colon-Kolacko, Rebecca Cotto, Dorothy Dillard, Kim Graham, Marshala Lee, Shyanne Miller, Michael Minor, Cimone Philpotts, Jaclyn Quinn, Shardae White and Christian Willauer. Read more about them here. A shout-out also to Social Contract, the outstanding consultants who helped design and coordinate the process.
I urge you to take a look at the report. Each section provides important insights and suggestions.
• Developing an Equity Lens describes the cohort’s work to define equity, and to understand and adopt an equity perspective.
• Empowering Communities provides an overview of the centrality of communities in the journey toward equity and offers recommendations for placing communities and their work at the forefront of the equity journey.
• Restructuring for Impact focuses on the organizational changes necessary to transform structures and processes to support and ensure equity.
• Institutionalizing Equity addresses the changes necessary in public awareness and education as well as in policies and law to shift toward equity.
• The Evolution of the Community Equity Project describes the goals, participants and process of the Community Equity Project.
The year ahead is going to be a momentous one. As we begin to ramp out of the pandemic, we need to keep our eyes on the changes we need to pursue. And in our vision of a Delaware that serves all, racial equity simply must be part of the equation.
My synapses are firing, and I’m full of appreciation and joy!
Last night, hundreds of you joined us in a discussion with Wes Moore – about race, structural racism, hope, and passion. We also heard from a local panel, featuring Bebe Coker, Rev. Edwin Estevez, Alonna Berry and Charito Calvachi-Mateyko, responding to Wes and sharing their thoughts about where we are, and where we need to go. 
Thank you to everybody who participated.
There is so much to digest and think about, but a few items stuck hard with me.
The racial awareness that has come about in 2020 is not, said Wes, because of something different that happened this year vs. last. Killings of, and harassment of, black men and boys have been with us for a long time, and are not going away. What’s different now is that we are in a movement, not a moment. And at some point, we will reach a time when we will say, “Can you believe racial justice was something people had to fight for?”
Wes also reminded us that we do not have the luxury of “looking past race,” when race remains the most accurate predictor of life outcomes in America.
Wes reminded us that every person’s story matters, and every story is interesting “because it is that person’s story.” Unfortunately, we too often don’t know people’s stories until it is too late.
And there’s not really room to discuss the powerful statements by all of our panelists. Suffice it to say, they were great.
Finally I appreciate that so many of us want to make progress. In his book Five Days, Wes says, “The figures in this book were each, in their way, fighting to prevent the tragedy of Freddie Gray from playing out again and again…In their small victories and looming failures, they revealed to me the importance of individual changemakers and the indispensable necessity of collective action.”
As for us at the DCF, we believe that collective and individual action to reduce racial inequities is and must remain central to all of our work. The work is not just a one-time thing, but will imbue all we do.
We are engaging in this work in a number of ways.
• Right now, in partnership with the Rodel Foundation, we are pleased to say that we will support a Delaware participant in the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, a national initiative co-chaired by Wes.
• We are developing new grant opportunities focused on better supporting and investing in leaders of color, the organizations they lead, and the communities they serve.
• We are implementing recommendations of the fellows who were part of our Community Equity Project – their work will be featured on the DCF website in the upcoming weeks.
• And we are continuing to participate with the Delaware Racial Justice Collaborative being coordinated by our partners at the United Way of Delaware.
We are on a path. And we all have a part to play. And (using Alonna Berry’s metaphor), while none of us alone can move the wall, we all need to work hard on moving our individual bricks.
I felt hopeful that people with such powerful voices and so many gifts are willing to take such great risks to make sure that change happens. That made me hopeful. But I also felt a lot of anger and embarrassment for myself and for this country. To me, this is the kind of book that you have to participate in a book club for, because you have to be able to unpack it with somebody, otherwise it really weighs on your heart. The thing that I enjoyed about the book is that it really showed how one person can have this ripple effect throughout the community. – Margie Lopez Waite at 9/23/2020 book discussion
The book circles are underway. In our third annual series of book discussions, Delawareans are now using Wes Moore’s Five Days as a stepping off point for deep dialogue about race and equity in our country.
The book tells the story of the days after Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore – from the perspectives of real people in the city – a business executive, a police officer, community activists, city councilman, and more. Through Wes’ book, we get a chance to hear the thoughts of many, all of whom want things to improve, but all of whom also see these challenges through their own lens.
Americans are seeking to confront our racial past, present and future. More of us are confronting our own role, our own opportunities, weaknesses, and biases. For me, I also come to this with a belief that the vast majority of us want to do the right thing, want to address the historical racism in the country, and and want to make change. But we don’t always know how to do that, have not done that yet, and recognize there is much yet to do. We owe it to our country’s future to lean in, reflect, learn, and be part of the solutions.
A colleague from the community foundation in Buffalo told the DCF Board recently that in their work on equity, they emphasize the importance of “calling people in to the conversation and the work, not calling people out [for their errors and weaknesses].” That’s how we hope this book helps the conversation. I hope this book contributes not just to the analysis, but also toward bringing people into the conversation, and inspiring the change we must see.
Wes will join us in a discussion on Thursday, November 19. We hope you will have read the book, talked with others about it, and are thinking about the change you can make before then. You can also join one of our larger book discussions – and can sign up on our website.
The 500 books we purchased for this event are, fortunately, already out in the hands of Delawareans. So we don’t have any more to send. But the state’s libraries have books to borrow (on-line, too), and the book is also available through on-line book portals. Please check it out, and join us on the 19th of November.
When you have your own book discussions, send us your observations, and photos, and we’ll share them as well. To do that, send comments to Kelly Sheridan (ksheridan@delcf.org).
What a long strange trip it’s been. Others have said it in more clever ways, and with deeper analysis, but 2020 is turning out to be both the year we never wanted to see, and a year that has laid bare our deepest challenges, and will present opportunities to make America better than we’ve ever been.
The pandemic, economic crisis, a continuing political maelstrom… And across and intertwined in it all, a recognition that racial equity is at the core of so very many of our challenges. This work – around equity and race in America – is defining work of our time, and work that DCF is in for the long haul.
It’s for these reasons that we are welcoming Wes Moore as our 2020 Building Opportunity speaker.
DCF’s Building Opportunity speaker series began in 2018 with Robert Putnam, at which point we announced our commitment to focusing on the tragic opportunity gap in America. We promised to keep our attention on the need for a society where all members can flourish. We followed that up with Jim and Deborah Fallows, who traveled the U.S. talking with people who are rebuilding their communities.
And now Wes Moore. He’ll be talking about his hot-off-the-presses book, Five Days. Wes, a Baltimore native, Rhodes scholar, former White House Fellow, and now CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, writes in this book about the aftermath of the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. He tells the story through the eyes of eight people from vastly different walks of life in the city, from business executives to police officers to protestors and family members.
When we reached out to Wes last fall, we discussed our desire to focus our opportunity gap on a specific discussion of race. We thought we’d talk about his book The Other Wes Moore. I won’t describe it here, but it’s a fabulous book, and one that forces us to consider the thin line that often separates lives that are successful, and lives that are not. But then Wes pointed out that his new book would be coming out this summer. And it’s about a police killing, and racial injustice, and people trying to do something about it. It couldn’t be timelier.
Because what we’re seeing in the COVID-19 crisis is that people of color are affected in much higher numbers that white people. We’re seeing more people of color in jobs that keep them squarely in the cross-hairs of the coronavirus. And while these times affect all of us, the greater challenges for Black and brown people are part of our reality, one that DCF is committed to addressing.
This will be an important discussion. Please join us. You can do so in two ways.
First, again we have books to give out to Book Circles. We urge you to read the book, talk about it, and consider where we go from here.
And then join us on November 19 as Wes talks about the book, and the realities of America today. We’re finalizing the details for that day But we think you’ll find it worthwhile.