Category Archives: Intentional Communities

Broken furniture. Flashlights with leaking batteries. Disfigured Barbie dolls.

Problem is, too many such items could most accurately be described as trash. Many of the donations are defective or worn-out items gifts from well-intentioned people who want to reduce waste but who donate items that simply shouldnt be donated.

The thrift stores, wary of discouraging donations, say that, as always, they welcome most contributions, especially after a recession that inflicted harm most heavily on the lowest-income Americans, many of whom now depend on them. And they note that most of the items that arrive at their stores remain perfectly acceptable.

But in the midst of spring cleaning season, the stores want to slow a barrage of unwanted contributions that increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the thrift stores, such donations aren't just a hassle to dispose of. They also magnify their garbage-disposal costs. The stores need time and staffing hours to process them.

The spikes in trash expenses can divert money away from other services the agencies could spend in their communities, like workforce development programs.

Goodwill Industries regional office out of Spokane oversees the Goodwill stores in Moses Lake and East Wenatchee. Goodwill Regional Vice President of Marketing, Heather Alexander, says the stores her district encompasses can get inundated with trash from time to time. She says some of the trash dropped off is unintentional and some of it is intentional.

Every dollar we spend on throwing out trash, takes money away from our program, Alexander told iFIBER ONE News. We do ask people to be mindful what they donate and when they donate.

Alexander says Goodwill will not accept anything that is ripped, cracked, completely broken, soiled, or anything with major blemishes.

Though, within the last decade Goodwill has created a salvage program that takes subpar items that conventional stores wouldnt accept and transfers it to various outlet stores. If the outlet stores dont accept them, they work with various recycling vendors. Alexander says the salvage program helps give additional purpose and value to donations.

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Unloading of trash at local Goodwill stores prompts message to communities - iFIBER One News

Last year, Providence invested more than $1.7 billion in improving the health of its communities

Why Providence Addressed Each Key Initiative in 2020:

"The community health investment team responds to our Mission's call to serve," said Justin Crowe, senior vice president of community partnerships. "By generating resources for our community programs and partners, we're creating an ecosystem that amplifies the voices of our local communities and promotes health, grassroots advocacy and a culture of inter-connectedness."

The community investments include the costs of uncompensated care for Medicaid, free or low-cost care, and many other programs and initiatives focused on improving the health of our communities, increasing access to care and making care more affordable.

These intentional investments make it possible for people to live their healthiest lives and allow our communities to reinvest in other vital programs. Caring for our communities has never been more important. To see community investments by state, visit the Annual Report to Our Communities website to view regional reports.

About ProvidenceProvidence is a national, not-for-profit Catholic health system comprising a diverse family of organizations and driven by a belief that health is a human right. With 52 hospitals, over 1,000 physician clinics, senior services, supportive housing, and many other health and educational services, the health system and its partners employ more than 120,000 caregivers serving communities across seven states Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, with system offices in Renton, Wash., and Irvine, Calif. Learn about our vision of health for a better world at Providence.org.

SOURCE Providence

http://providence.org

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Providence Releases 2020 Report Showcasing $1.7 Billion in Community Support - PRNewswire

By Caroline White Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service

This story was originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, where you can find other stories reporting on fifteen city neighborhoods in Milwaukee. Visit milwaukeenns.org.

Members of the African American Roundtable believe there is untapped leadership potential in communities all over Milwaukee.

And they want to unlock it.

The roundtable, which comprises dozens of groups and individuals, has played instrumental roles in local causes, including voter education, calls to increase the minimum wage and the push for justice for victims of police brutality. Along the way, roundtable members have made an intentional effort to include and educate Milwaukee residents on the causes that affect them.

If no one is giving you the skills, how will you know? said Markasa Tucker, executive director.

Currently, the roundtables efforts are focused on ensuring the community has a say in how the money the City of Milwaukee is receiving through the American Rescue Plan Act is spent. The plan, a COVID-recovery economic stimulus package, was signed by President Joe Biden in March.

Milwaukee received the first of two $200 million dollar payments on May 10, and the roundtable is demanding that no money be spent until city leaders formulate a plan to include community voices. The groups complete list of demands, including that no money go to the police, can be read on its community sign-on letter.

Making moves

In January, the African American Roundtable, also known as AART, moved its home base from Wisconsin Voices to the Hmong American Womens Association, or HAWA. As a fiscal project of HAWA, it has been able to hire new staff members and launch a paid community leadership fellowship program. At the end of March, which is Womens History Month, the group unveiled its all-woman-led board.

Tammie Xiong, the executive director of the Hmong American Womens Association, said the collaboration between HAWA and AART is natural and mutually beneficial. Both groups are working to uplift women, LGBTQ people and people of color through their community organizing efforts.

The work being led by AART is also liberating our communities and giving us an opportunity to re-imagine a community that we can all thrive in, Xiong said in an email.

The long-term goal for the roundtable is to become an independent nonprofit and perhaps one day have its own building. These plans come after nine years of working on campaigns under other nonprofits.

Humble beginnings

The African American Roundtable began under Citizen Action in 2012 with the leadership of Mike Wilder, the first executive director. It was funded by grant money given to help engage and educate Wisconsin Black voters in the gubernatorial recall election of that year. Specifically, the group worked to dispel misinformation about voter identification laws.

Anita Johnson, now a board member of the roundtable, has been a member of AART since the beginning. She said these early organizing efforts showed her and other members how influential educating the public could be.

The power is in giving the information to the people, Johnson said. The power is in educating the community.

The roundtable operated under different organizations as Wilder changed jobs. In 2013, when AART was a part of Wisconsin Jobs Now, the group became involved with the Fight for 15, a movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

The Fight for 15 transformed into a more localized campaign to increase the hourly pay of those employed by the City of Milwaukee. In July 2014, the city announced the wage of workers would increase from $9.51 to $10.80 per hour.

Wilder described that as a huge morale booster that showed him and other roundtable members that their work could influence real change.

When we saw that we could make an impact at a local level, that was just amazing, Wilder said.

The roundtable then became a part of Wisconsin Voices at the beginning of 2014. Months later, Dontre Hamilton, a 31-year-old Milwaukeean, was shot and killed by a police officer at Red Arrow Park.

Following his death, AART members and other community organizers worked to support the Hamilton family and push for accountability and reform within the Milwaukee Police Department through the Coalition for Justice.

Wilder described that time as a turning point for the group. Hamiltons death garnered national attention. The roundtable worked to rally the community to demand answers from the city.

Ive seen some big movements, but I havent seen anything like that, Wilder said. The whole city came together.

In 2016, the United States Department of Justice spent 10 months auditing the Milwaukee Police Department and Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission. A draft report was leaked and then made public, but a final report was never produced.

In response to the incomplete audit, the roundtable worked closely with the Collaborative Community Committee, formed by the Common Council, to continue the push for police reform. In 2017, the groups held nearly 50 public meetings to discuss policing and public safety with community members.

Tucker, who joined the roundtable in 2014 and the Collaborative Community Committee in 2017, described that period as exhausting but life-changing for her.

I wanted to be a part of something tangible to change the things I was seeing, Tucker said.

During this time, Tucker and other community organizers began to turn their attention toward the city budgetspecifically, how much money was being dedicated to the Milwaukee Police Department.

Tucker said she knew the community would pay attention if they knew how much money the police department was funded compared with affordable quality housing, youth programming, violence prevention and other causes. The problem was that barely any residents attended the city budget hearing. Tucker recalled that in 2018, only five residents turned out.

I vowed at that point that that would not be the case next year, Tucker said.

On Juneteenth Day 2019, the roundtable and over 25 other community partners announced LiberateMKEa campaign that demanded a $25 million divestment from the Milwaukee Police Department.

LiberateMKE organizers spent the rest of the summer surveying over 1,000 Milwaukeeans about policy recommendations and opinions on what funds should be reallocated in the city budget. The groups also held sessions to prepare residents to speak at public hearings and train them on how to lobby their alderperson.

Over 350 people attended the city budget hearing in 2019. Police funding in the 2020 budget was decreased by $900,000, and the staff was reduced by 60 officers. An additional $72,000 was allocated to summer youth internship programs, $300,000 went to create an emergency housing program and $240,000 was allocated to Health Department programming.

LiberateMKE relaunched in 2020 and the campaign demanded a $75 million divestment in the 2021 budget. In the final adopted 2021 budget, the police budget was reduced by almost $2.2 million and 120 officer positions were cut.

Tucker said that although these reductions were not as much as the campaign organizers had hoped for, she sees the value in incremental change and knows that new community leaders will step up to continue this fight and others.

The roundtable has started investing in and empowering new community leaders through book clubs, study groups and, most recently, paid fellowship programs called Leadership Development Cohorts.

We know community wins because we have people power, Tucker said

The roundtable hosts monthly meetings for Black community members every second Tuesday of the month starting at 6 p.m. on Zoom. Register here. https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAvde6tqzMoGdEOezHCtMhoI36zyXLg8V1f

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NNS Spotlight: 'People power': How the African American Roundtable Works to Educate and Empower Leaders - Milwaukee Courier Weekly Newspaper

Insights is a SmartBrief Education Originals column that features perspectives from noted experts and leaders in education on hot-button issues affecting schools and districts. All contributors are selected by the SmartBrief Education editorial team.

Children, families and communities have stories unique to their journey, and all of those experiences exist within the broader context of the history we share. For too long, curriculum has presented children with an incomplete view of this shared past by failing to include all of our voices and perspectives. The youngest learners must understand their place in the world, develop an understanding of the events that created current circumstances, and recognize the consequences of past choices that led to failures and successes.

Learning only one point of view does not provide students with the context they need. Curriculum reform is necessary if we hope to provide our children with an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and solve future problems. Here are a few suggestions to begin working toward a more inclusive curriculum today.

The process of auditing curriculum content helps educators understand gaps in representation, voices missing, and content that needs to be reviewed. Before an audit can begin, teams must establish their own expectations and the guidelines for the curriculum that they hope to build. Once a team has the end goal in mind, they can begin to create a rubric or tool to support the review with a standardized lens. The rubric should highlight guiding principles such as broad, asset-based representation; factual details for historical events; authentic cultural context; variety of perspectives offered in literature and historical details; and more.

It is also essential to prioritize including a diverse team to complete the audit process. Any audit that is completed by a team with only one perspective will not result in a holistic view of the curriculum.

Just as we are always learning best practices for effectively instructing students, curriculum designers are always finding new resources and voices to include in their design. School and district leaders should spend time outlining their own principles in relation to the population of students they serve and then reviewing curriculum based upon those priority guidelines.

Its also a good idea to ensure that all voices, such as parents, students, and teachers, are represented on the request-for-proposal team along with leaders within a school or district. Setting aside time to learn about a curriculum designer teams guiding principles for development and the ways in which they audit their own content is also important.

Identifying a curriculum developed with a specific commitment towards including a diverse array of experiences and a wide range of representation is the first step. This is only the beginning though. A universal curriculum must include a continuous commitment to ongoing learning and development in collaboration with communities being served by the content.

Even with reviews and alignments to standards, an organizations commitment to their ongoing learning and continuous improvement is essential. If school and district leaders can work in partnership with curriculum teams, theyre more likely to be investing in organizations that are committed to building diverse learning experiences for children.

Educators need support when learning how to implement, create, and modify curriculum to meet the needs of the students they serve. Learning specifics about the populations of students within their community is often a missing piece for teachers. Seeking out perspectives that have historically been missing from conversations about past events, and giving teachers access to these experiences, can help build their own understanding about how we must be intentional as we present content to children.

Giving teachers specific support to guide classroom conversations and time to role-play and practice is also important, as is creating opportunities for adults to explore their own biases and blindspots. If we hope to change the ways in which our children learn about diversity and how to include everyone in conversations, then we must model this by supporting the ongoing learning for the adults who interact with them each day.

Teachers themselves can model perspective-taking and supplement curriculum with the experiences of those who may not already be represented. For example, if a class is learning about their own community, they may not think to interview those who live near them. Incorporating real-life examples into the curriculum creates a greater chance that the ideas will be culturally relevant to students and families.

After interviewing members of the community, the teacher could model the practice of checking to verify that all voices are heard. The children might remember that they did not include the voice of their local mail person or librarian. They could then make the effort to interview those community members and learn how important each person is when researching and investigating a topic.

Families are essential members of a school community, and throughout the pandemic, we have learned just how important caregivers are to a childs success. They also have lived experiences, cultural collateral, and knowledge that should be incorporated into learning experiences within the school. Often, schools invite families for international day or career night, which is a great beginning; however, asking them to be a part of all school choices and initiatives is a more intentional way of bringing community voices into decisions that impact children and learning. We simply do not know what we do not know. We must seek out support from others who might illuminate our perspective and shine a light on the ways we could more effectively impact children.

There are even plenty of examples where children and families create books or resources together that become part of the curriculum of the school. This is definitely a two-way support system that must be built on strong, trusting, authentic relationships. Communities and school leaders bear the responsibility of creating an environment where those relationships can flourish. The best way to begin to instill trust is to ensure families see themselves represented in and respected by the content their children are learning.

Jenni Torres, the senior vice president of curriculum and instruction at Waterford.org, is a passionate curriculum designer and educator who manages the development of research-based content, correlations to standards, and creation of teacher and family resources. During fifteen years in the classroom, Jenni was selected by the U.S. State Department as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher for Uruguay and was awarded Teacher of the Year honors at the school, county and district levels. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

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4 keys to improving representation in classroom content - SmartBrief

In summary

Why cant California utilize prescribed burns that everyone knows are key to restoring biodiversity and resilience?

Jane Braxton Little, based in the northern Sierra Nevada, is an independent journalist covering science and natural resource issues for publications that include the Atlantic, Audubon, Discover, National Geographic and Scientific American, jblittle@dyerpress.com.

Land managers agree. Policymakers agree. The science is unequivocal. If we dont get more beneficial fire on the ground in California, were going to lose it all to wildfire.

Yet last year, when wildfires scorched more than 4 million acres and killed 33 people, federal and state agencies treated an only 80,000 acres with prescribed burns 16% of what scientists believe California forestlands need to maintain biodiversity and resilience.

As summer approaches and worse-than-ever blazes are predicted for the state officially sinking into drought, the urgency to dramatically increase controlled fire has morphed into frustration-fueled dread. Why cant California set the intentional burns everyone knows are key to restoring biodiversity and fire resilience?

A century of fire suppression and industrial logging has distanced us from natural fire, a keystone ecological process as essential to forests as sunshine and rain. We have severed that critical relationship maintained by Native Americans, who for millennia lit fires to keep forests cleansed of flammable underbrush.

Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service, the agencies responsible for managing most of the states forestland, have institutionalized this disconnect by relying on an ethic that calls for controlling natural resources, including fire.

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Fighting fire is Cal Fires major mission, confirmed by renaming the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in 1995. The U.S. Forest Service has never rid itself of the century-old mentality that all fires must be suppressed by 10 a.m. the next day.

As recently as the 1970s, agency officials were arresting Native Americans for setting intentional fires. Their academic counterparts mocked UC Berkeleys School of Forestry Professor Harold Biswell, who promoted prescribed burning as a management tool, calling him Burn-Em-Up Biswell.

Today both agencies retain unerring allegiance to this control culture despite their public commitment to the benefits of returning natural fire to forest ecosystems. The U.S. Forest Service offers few incentives to district rangers who initiate prescribed burns, instead penalizing them for the less than 1% that escape beyond control lines. These are agencies that reward caution at the expense of innovation even when science supports it.

One ramification is a reluctance to commit to developing a workforce of trained year-round burners. Both the Forest Service and Cal Fire continue to rely on crews trained to fight, not light fires. When a wildfire breaks out, these crews drop their rakes and drip torches for the chainsaws and helicopters that promise overtime pay and macho glory. Even the 2019 Caples prescribed burn, planned for three years as the largest intentional fire in the Sierra Nevada, saw two interagency hotshot crews leave mid-burn for higher priority fire assignments.

Some of these barriers are starting to come down. The Forest Service and Cal Fire have each committed to treat 500,000 acres per year by 2025 with mechanical thinning or controlled burning. Prescribed burns are a fraction of these on-the-ground treatments. Still, Cal Fires 30,000-acre target for this year is 10 times the actual prescribed fire acreage accomplished in 2015; it has already burned 11,000 acres. The Forest Service applied intentional fire to nearly 60,000 acres last year and has gradually increased its goals.

Attitudes, too, are changing. When the 1,080-acre Caples Fire escaped the designated area and burned 2,355additional acres, Eldorado National Forest and regional officials backed the local leadership, calling the escape a calculated risk and part of the learning process.

Keep tabs on the latest California policy and politics news

But even the agencies accelerated goals pale against the acreage scientists say forests need to be resilient. Historically natural fire burned nearly 500,000 acres annually in the Sierra alone, according to a study published in the Society of American Foresters. The backlog of prescribed burns has grown to nearly 3 million acres. At the current rate two-thirds of Californias national forest lands will never be treated with intentional cleansing fire.

Along with entrenched agency reluctance, robust prescribed burn programs face another major hurdle: smoke. No one likes it, and prescribed fires emit it. When their constituents complain, politicians pressure agencies to stop both intentional burns and monitored lightning starts.

These short-term political fixes extend the long-term fire deficit. Air emissions technology is evolving rapidly, allowing agencies to determine where smoke plumes are heading and manage fires to limit pollution in communities. Using prescribed fires strategically can actually protect public health by reducing out-of-control fires, which emit far more toxicity than controlled burns, says Craig Thomas, director of the Fire Restoration Group: Its a tradeoff. We either work with fire or it eats our lunch.

To achieve forest resilience we need to change our relationship with fire. When his Karuk ancestors caught a whiff of smoke in the air it made them feel safe, says Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy of the Karuk Tribe. They knew their communities were better protected.

With wildfires incinerating entire towns and torching millions of acres of forestland, management agencies should heed the nurturing power of natural fire. Managed thoughtfully, it is a guardian we can trust to protect us from uncontrolled infernos.

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Jane Braxton Little has also written about the paradox of the California condor, conserving Tejon Ranch, reclaimed homelands of Northern California tribes and how the pandemic ended the 153-year-old Feather River Bulletin.

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To achieve forest health, we need to change our relationship with fire - CalMatters

Parents in a breakout session during a Family Learning Villages workshop. (Photo by Derrick Beasley)

Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it, said civil rights and human rights activist Ella Baker. She may not be viewed as a pioneer of equitable implementation, but her outsize impact on the civil rights movement was grounded in her ability to listen and support the leadership and wisdom of people most affected by racism.

Implementation sciencethe study of the uptake, scale, and sustainability of social programshas failed to advance strategies to address equity. This collection of articles reviews case studies and articulates lessons for incorporating the knowledge and leadership of marginalized communities into the policies and practices intended to serve them. Sponsored by the Anne E. Casey Foundation

My name is William Jackson and Im the founder and a team member of Village of Wisdom, an organization leveraging the collective wisdom of Black families to support advocacy and organizing for racially just schools. Bakers approach was unknown to our team when we founded Village of Wisdom (VOW) in 2014, but the spirit of her approach informs everything we do. Indeed, it wasnt hard to convince us, as the children of Black parents ourselves, that Black parentsa Black childs first teachersmight know best how to facilitate learning for Black children.

VOWs solution was simple at its core: Leverage the cultural wisdom of Black parents to affirm their childrens Blackness as an antidote to a world that actively depletes their self-worth through systemic racism and interpersonal racial discrimination.1 Our work was initially informed by strength-based racial socialization research, which traditionally focuses on how Black parents communicate the idea of race to their children.2 We aimed to create spaces where Black parents shared racially affirming messages they used with their children and how they used those messages to prepare their children to cope with the racism they would experience in school. We drew upon the research of scholars such as Enrique Neblett,Stephanie Coard, and Howard Stevenson.

We initially called the workshops we developed to support Black parents in assisting their children Family Learning Villages. We gave families space to develop their approach to navigate school settings dominated by white teachers and plagued by white supremacy (such as devaluing and erasing the contributions of Black people, prioritizing white teacher comfort over Black student learning and rights, and villainizing Black student language, hair, and clothes). The name we chose for these sessions reflected our teams instinctive beliefs as the children of Black parents who had helped each of us navigate American schools. We knew Black parents had a lot of wisdom to share; we just needed to create a space for them to share insights with and learn from each other.We also provided content to encourage conversation between parents that would amplify racial pride and deepen perspectives on racism and how to undermine it. Realizing the connection between economic oppression and racism, we also established the practice of compensating Black parents for their time and intellectual contributions during these first workshops.

Our communal approach that structurally and financially demonstrated respect for Black parent wisdom struck a sharp contrast with the majority of parent support programs: As psychologist Stephanie Coard has asserted, most parenting programs have been problematically designed by whites looking to fix the parenting of Black people.3 Unfortunately, the working assumption of most parent training programs seems to be that the Black parents lack the expertise to contribute to conversations about parenting Black children.

Our intentional approach to structure our workshops to promote and compensate Black parent wisdom sharing proved fruitful. Specifically, the Family Learning Villages revealed what parents knew, what they wanted for their children, and what teaching strategies would likely be successful with Black students.Even more, we learned that when we approach parents with information to explore, Black parents will not only deepen our understanding of the issues facing Black families but also contribute to the work themselves. They saw us and more importantly themselves as coconspirators in the collective struggle for liberationa future where self-determination for all, especially for Black people, is a reality and a right.

As VOW staff listened to the dreams and frustrations of parents, we noticed that many of them were passionate about the same issues: their children didnt trust their teachers; their children werent interested in the lessons; and there wasnt enough Black history being taught. We werent the only people hearing Black parents complaintsbut we were different from others in that we were one of the few groups really listening to parents concerns as valid critiques.

Through this listening, VOW staff realized that Black parents were experiencing the same processes of dehumanization as their children. Black parents were clearly articulating their realities and acutely identifying the root causes of how schools were failing them and their children. However, due to the white supremacist motivations of schools (e.g., worship of the written word), the genius of Black parents was being overlooked and undervalued. Through my understanding of the world as constructed in the Black homes, baseball parks, and churches where I grew up, I heard the Black parents voices loud and clear.

In fact there was a lot of research theory that aligned with their wisdom. For instance, Bren Browns research on vulnerability tells us that if a child cant trust you, they cant learn, love, or create in that environment.4 Even more, we know that if students are not interested in the instructional content, they cannot sustain the type of learning psychologists Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan cite in their self-determination theory as necessary for tasks requiring sustained effort.5 Just as important, the need for Black history is well substantiated by a multitude of Black researchers who have outlined the importance of racial identity affirmation for Black children.6 Our team heard parents clearly say that their children did not deserve to be taught how to cope with racism; their children deserved liberatory learning environments that affirmed their humanity.

With critical insights gleaned from Black parents, VOW team membersespecially Taylor Webber-Fields, Amber Majors, and Aya Shabupushed me to center the cultural knowledge and experience of Black parents in all of our work. Not only did we decide to center our organizational theory of culturally affirming instruction based on parents observations, but we also realized we needed to codify Black parents insights about the tools and strategies needed to build culturally affirming instruction that could help educators and others better use these insights. Therefore, parents became collaborators in developing the grounding framework of our organization: the Black Genius framework. This structure brings together six elements of culturally affirming learning environments that encourage the healthy development of Black childrens intellectual curiosity and racial identity. The identification of the Black Genius framework also solidified the evolution of our program model to focus our efforts on transforming schools into more culturally affirming learning environments where Black children experience less discrimination.

Equity consultants and evaluators Donna-Marie Winn and Marvin McKinney offer a useful analogy of fish swimming in dirty water to help elucidate the difference between liberatory, resilience and deficit-based efforts.7 In a situation where the majority of fish in a body of water are dying, the only rational conclusion is that the water is dirty or poisoned. A deficit approach focuses on fixing the dying fish rather than the water that is killing them. Unfortunately, most interventions and organizations purporting to serve Black children see them as problems to be fixed, and even more often see their families and communities as the source of their issues. Racial socialization research and our first workshops with parents taught us that Black parents were instead critical agents protecting their children from the dirty water that was killing the spirits of their children.

Focusing on learning from and with the community is a core tenet of equitable implementation. Unfortunately, investing in the wisdom of Black parents was a difficult concept to describe and build support for in the philanthropic and social science sectors, where intervention work too often starts from the deficit-based, fish-fixing paradigm. For example, requests for proposals (RFPs) call for responses to, How will the work improve student performance? How will your organization change student behavior? How many students will your organization work with this year? These types of RFP questions discourage equitable implementation strategies and incentivize problematic, deficit-based approaches focused on fixing students and not the water.

As an organization, we began looking for assessments that would elucidate the culture and climate Black students face. We wanted to know how dirty the water was. Only then would we be able to identify the impact of racism and demonstrate how efforts could reduce both the impact and presence of discrimination in schools. We knew that if we wanted to measure the issues that were the most important to change, we would need to assess the water.

The exploratory structure of our Family Learning Villages workshops gave parents a forum to tell us what their children deserved in learning environments. We took the six factors Black parents identified and developed a student-perspective survey so that youth themselves could evaluate whether the instruction they were receiving was culturally affirming. We validated the survey with more than 1,000 students from five different schools. Preliminary statistical results found the items within the survey were measuring the phenomena related to cultural affirmation in the classroom. Student positive reports of cultural affirmation across the six factors were positively correlated with attendance and negatively correlated with suspension rates. Two of the cultural affirmation factors were correlated with overall academic performance. In other words: Exploring the wisdom of Black parents led us to an assessment design that was desperately needed by the field to assess how to create ideal learning environments for Black children.

Coping strategies are obviously necessary as institutional racism is not going to be dispelled by a magic wand.But building resiliency is not a pathway to liberation, nor does it address the inequities that give racist systems their power. An equitable implementation approach allowed us to see that we were called to do more than just work with Black parents to prepare their children to cope with racism and discrimination in school. Our work had to include transforming instruction into being more culturally affirming.

We struggled to balance our potential impact in schools with our original commitment to center Black parents in our work. We needed a way to make the process of identifying a Black-parent informed framework and developing a Black-parent validated instrument more intentional and repeatable. This realization led our organization to our most compelling question to date: What if we identified processes that intentionally did what we previously did in a more organic fashionput parents in spaces to identify and evaluate culturally affirming strategies?

We found our answer in community-based participatory research (CBPR): the act of putting people closest to the phenomena being explored by a research study in control of the study. We endeavored to identify culturally affirming strategies that would be validated by Black parent researchers. We started where we beganwith a group of parents in workshops talking to each other about how they were affirming their children in the middle of a double pandemic (i.e., COVID-19 and racism). We identified five parents from this group to be our inaugural group of Black Parent Researchers. Just as before, we compensated these parents throughout the process for their intellectual contributions.

After receiving training on facilitating focus group discussions, the Black Parent Researchers facilitated a series of focus groups for parents, teachers, and students about their dreams for a culturally affirming learning environment. Using both equitable implementation and CBPR practices, we involved those parents in interpreting the meaning of the research findings. We used the emergent findings from the CBPR process to ignite a user-centered design process. Powered by Black homeschoolers, teachers, and parents, this process identified culturally affirming instructional strategies for teachers and resources for parents. We plan to repeat this process continuously to provide the education field with a myriad of culturally affirming learning strategies validated by Black parents.

CBPR approaches are a means to achieving equitable implementation.Our approach has included three key elements of equitable implementation. First, we engage the community in assessing the problem, developing strategies, and validating solutions, with Black parents playing an integral role from the very beginning. Second, we make sure that we are compensating contributions equitably. Third, we pay explicit attention to cultural knowledge, history, and values in designing programs, with the shared wisdom of Black parents being integral in designing our frameworks and tools.

Despite these efforts, equitable implementation has its challenges, many of them systemic. We are seeking resources from an inequitable ecosystem where the preponderance of the funding, frameworks, and measures are driven by deficit frameworks focused on fixing the systematically oppressed, rather than the systems of oppression. In fact, many academic historians, including Ibram Kendi, have detailed that much of the historically foundational research informing Americas most common assessments in psychology and education have been corrupted by pseudo-scientific scholarship whose primary purpose was to exclude and dehumanize Black people. Funders like to invest in impact by supporting evidence-based programming that sees impact as fixing fish.

Our organizationlike most organizationsis swimming in dirty water. These factors make it difficult for Black-led, equity-focused organizations to identify evidence that supports their oftentimes sophisticated equitable implementation approaches. Our hope is that other Black-led organizations will see our model and know that, despite the barriers, their work is essential and the how of their work is just as important as they think it is. Equally important, those who wield institutional power need to join the struggle for racial equity by examining how they might adopt an equitable implementation approach and shift the institutional inertia of their organizations toward freedom and liberation. Our hope is that we are all not held captive to how things have always been, but rather that we can move forward to pursue more equitable structures built on visions of a transformed world.

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Village of Wisdom Used Community-Based Participatory Research to Co-Design Education with Black Families - Stanford Social Innovation Review

The city has also proposed a $400 million General Obligation Bond to fund job-creating infrastructure projects. The combined funding would support residents and industries hit hardest by the pandemic, revitalize businesses, create thousands of higher-paying jobs and stimulate the economy through infrastructure and workforce development, the city said. The General Obligation Bond will require City Council referral and voter approval.

Denverites are asked to take a series of surveys on their top priorities for the funding, which can be found here. The city has also planned four virtual townhalls:

City officials will call Denver households, but residents are encouraged to register ahead of time here to receive a call. Denverites can also dial in to a meeting:

Don't miss the latest news updates in Denver: Free Denver Patch Newsletters and Email Alerts | Facebook | Twitter

"We intend to get our economy moving again, build back better and sustain this recovery, especially for those workers and businesses in sectors that will be foundational to our success in the wake of this pandemic," Mayor Michael Hancock said.

"Engaging our residents to help determine what will be included in this package and where funding will be directed will help us to make the broadest impact across our city not just over the next several months, but for years into the future."

The economic recovery strategy focuses on community and business supports as well as infrastructure investments to rebuild Denver's economy in a way that is equitable, sustainable and supports communities most impacted by the pandemic, city officials said.

"Residents know what resources will have the greatest impacts for them and their neighborhoods," said Stacie Gilmore, Denver City Council president.

"We want to hear how the community, especially those hit hardest by the pandemic, would prioritize stimulus recovery dollars. It is crucial that we are intentional during this process about reaching and listening to diverse perspectives to achieve an equitable, long-term recovery plan."

The General Obligation Bond would fund capital infrastructure projects across the city, officials said. For every $10 million spent on construction, 130 jobs are created, which results in $20 million in economic activity, according to the city.

The city will convene a diverse group of stakeholders to serve on a Stimulus Investment Advisory Committee, which will review public, agency, and City Council feedback, and use the community's guidance to inform potential funding proposals, officials said.

The General Obligation Bond will have an additional stakeholder committee which will use the public feedback to identify infrastructure projects that best meet the goals and desires of the community to create sustainable economic recovery, the city said.

The emergency funding for local governments was established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. The funds are meant to be used to respond to acute pandemic-response needs, fill revenue shortfalls among state and local governments, and support the communities and populations hardest-hit by the COVID-19 crisis, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

The rest is here:

Denver To Receive $308M In Rescue Plan: Survey, Townhalls Planned - Patch.com

In 2011, Roderick Bremby was named commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Social Services, with responsibility for the states Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and more than 60 additional programs, including Medicaid. CT SNAP was then ranked among the countrys worst food stamp programs, with overwhelmed staff and delayed and inaccurate benefits. Over the next several years, Bremby transformed the program, reengineering business processes and digitizing, and streamlining the application process. By 2018, the federal government recognized the program as one of the best in the country.

Before coming to Connecticut, Bremby served as secretary of health and environment in state government in Kansas, where he made headlines when he cited greenhouse gas emissions in denying a permit for a proposed coal-burning power plant. He is now an executive in the global public health business unit at Salesforce, which has provided contact tracing worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic and introduced a vaccine management solution in the fall of 2020.

Recently, CT SNAPs turnaround was the subject of a Yale SOM case study, co-authored by Professor Teresa Chahine for her course Social Entrepreneurship in Public Health. Earlier this year, Chahine talked with Bremby about bringing private-sector-style innovation to state government and the role of businesses in addressing societal needs like public healtha convergence that is accelerating during the pandemic.Ben Mattison

Teresa Chahine: When I had a call with Rod to prepare for him visiting my class, and he told me about his role at Salesforce and how theyre deploying solutions to address COVIDat the time, it was contract tracing, and now its the vaccineI said, We can start with the case, but then Id also love for you to just speak to my students about your work in the private sector today, and how and why you joined the private sector after leading state government agencies in multiple states. I think we need to talk about that.

The CT SNAP case was meant to be about intrapreneurship and innovation within the government, within a public health agency. But we also ended up talking about Salesforces core values and as an example of conscious capitalism, where companies feel their role is to produce positive social and environmental outputs in addition to positive economic results. And conscious capitalism is something that keeps coming up in my classes, and its really what SOM embodiesthe intersection of business and society.

I wondered whether this is a moment in time when public health could serve as a platform and an opportunity for more companies to start practicing conscious capitalism because everybody has a vested interest in a healthy society.

Business leaders dont often think of themselves as people who have a role to play in public health. But everything is a driver of health, so a company could impact education, nutrition, pollution, transportation, access to green space, healthy communities, racial equity, gender equity. No matter what your job is, you can produce positive health outcomes.

Rod, a great place to start would be to tell us a little bit more about how you took CT SNAP from worst to first. What was the role of innovation and private-sector methodologies?

Roderick Bremby: In terms of that transformation, we had a lot of teams working together. Some of the private-sector capabilities deployed were business process reengineering. Simply, we wanted to understand how the work was being performed through process analysis, and then assess where the efficiencies could occur and eliminate redundancy and increase workforce capacity.

Prior to this work, fewer than 6% of customers visiting our 12 regional offices left with their business wholly accomplished. In other words, they had to keep coming back repeatedly. And we convinced the teamthe staff in the fieldthat if they were able to satisfy their customers needs with one visit, it would make their customers lives easier, and it would make our lives easier, given that we wouldnt have to keep paperwork available, stored, and ready, for the customer to return. So we were able to go through the business reengineering process, drive something north of 90% of first-touch resolution across all offices within a matter of months.

We had a transformation on the Medicaid side of our organization as well. When I came into the Malloy administration, there was a desire to move towards a single-payer, state-based healthcare program. When Malloy came in, [former secretary of the office of policy and management] Ben Barnes reviewed the condition of the state budget and found that it was not possible to support a single-payer healthcare program for the state.

So we did, I think, the next best thing. We decided to implement a self-insured Medicaid program, a radical departure from the direction most state Medicaid programs were moving. Most states contract with managed care organizations to minimize their risk and cap their annual expenditures for the Medicaid program. We went the other way and became self-insured as a state in 2012, which meant that if our expenditures exceeded the line item in the budget, resources from other places in the budget would need to be found to ensure that the budget balanced at the end of the year.

So we again deployed best practices from the private sector. We performed risk stratification across the Medicaid population to understand which members were indicated for additional cost trends. And we also engaged an administrative service organization to deploy an intervention using nurses for intensive care management for those members. Nurses engaged Medicaid members at the greatest risk of increased cost or chronic conditions to ensure that they received the services needed, whether access to specialists, transportation to a physician, food if they were food insecure.

Long story short, from 2012 to 2017, the Connecticut Medicaid program experienced the greatest per-member, per-month cost reduction of any Medicaid, Medicare, or private plan in the nation. This success was documented in a Health Affairs article. A health researcher from New Haven estimated that the program saved the state billions of dollars.

Our administrative cost burden was a little under 3%, lets say 2.5%. Most Medicaid programs pay private organizations anywhere between 8% and 12% to administer Medicaid services. So if you just look at a 5.5% reduction off of a $6 billion base for administrative purposes, you realize minimally a $300 million annual program cost avoidance.

As Teresa said, before coming to Connecticut, I was privileged to lead public and environmental health in Kansas. And my goal under then-Governor Sebelius was to integrate those two functions. We launched a Healthy Kansas initiative as the public health component of the governors health reform agenda. On the environment side, we began to look more closely at our permitting processes and environmental sustainability.

In 2007, I became the first U.S. official to deny an emissions permit on the basis of climate change. This was a coal-fired plant planned for the western part of the state. Earlier that year, in April, Massachusetts vs. EPA was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and affirmed that CO2 could be defined as an emission. I used this ruling and an endangerment finding as the basis of my decision. Then, all hell broke loose. Governor Sebelius vetoed three actions of the legislature seeking to overturn the decision. She prevailed each time.

On election day 2010, Sam Brownback was elected governor of Kansas. It was still a tumultuous time, but that led to me transitioning out of Kansas to Connecticut.

After I left my role in Connecticut in July 2019, I decided that I wanted to pursue impact at scale, and I thought the private sector would afford that opportunity. I chose Salesforce because of the culture, the values, and the market-leading technology they had begun to create for the public sector marketplace.

Over the last year, Salesforce has responded aggressively to COVID and other challenges weve been experiencing domestically. The organization committed over $200 million to organizations advancing racial equality and justice. Fifty million pieces of PPE were sourced for hospitals, $30 million donated to frontline organizations in support of relief efforts. And in education, $20 million to help schoolchildren go online and learn from anywherenot that the organization was asked to do it these things, but it was some of the ways it could help. Additionally, Salesforce is partnering with GAVI, a global NGO, to help deliver two billion doses of COVID vaccine to developing countries across the globe by 2023.

Theres also the value of the Salesforce workforce. Each employee is encouraged to give back 1% of their time, as the organization contributes back 1% of its equity and 1% of the product. So not only are we actively engaged in a business sense, but were also trying to support communities and organizations that our products touch. Its a culture. Its not a gimmick. Its something that the organization does because its the right thing to do.

When Teresa and I spoke last year, we spoke about how the organization was supporting public-sector organizations in their contact-tracing responses. Since then, and over the course of the year, most residents of the United States are supported by contact-tracing solutions powered by the Salesforce platform. Thats a story that few people have heard, but we were able to go from no deployments to be the leading solution. And since then, weve focused on supporting vaccine administration programs.

In terms of framing the conversation, its important to understand that public health has been woefully underfunded over the last decade. COVID exposed the lack of readiness and capability in terms of human and technological resources. Much of the technology was secured through solution-focused, grant-funded opportunities with little opportunity to think about interoperable scalable systems. And with COVID, we were able to rapidly deploy technology to augment existing systems in most instances and replace systems when the customer desired.

But we also see this as an opportunity to create a public health platform that centers on equity. Thats really where the work needs to be extended. And as we think about supporting public health objectives to increase whole population wellbeing, the Salesforce platform can certainly help. Solutions to support syndromic surveillance, a 360-degree view of a community with the people and the environment in which they live. Knowing whats going on in communities, being able to survey community members, being able to communicate in ways that maximize social media channels allows public health organizations a more powerful capability for community health assessment and analysis.

Back when I was in working in public health, we only had to worry about, say, four channels for an effective communication program. Now with over 100 social media channels, public health leaders need to access to significantly more channels, sample them, understand public sentiment, and position messages that people will understand. Residents need to understand their options, how choices, resources, and supports can help sustain and improve wellbeing. So thats an example of how the private sector and the public sector can begin to forge a relationship to elevate the wellbeing of the population through public healthagain, centering on equity because thats really where we all have a role to play.

Chahine: I agree. I think the private sector has a huge role to play and that the public sector needs to drive it because it needs to center on equity, as you said. Racial inequity in the drivers of health and in health outcomes has always been there, but only people in the public health sector knew about it and were working on it. And now its been really brought to the forefront of everybodys mind and everybodys agenda. And thats why I think this is a moment in time when everybody has a role to play.

In many cases, the private sector worsens inequities. But you can just as easily imagine a situation where the private sector has a role to play in improving health inequities and racial inequities. And I think its the job of the public sector to be really proactive and strategic about how its going to engage the private sector and work with the private sector so that the role of the private sector will improve those inequities rather than making them worse.

Bremby: Absolutely. I participated in a town hall meeting earlier this afternoon. And I mentioned that we are in a race unlike any other in our lifetimes. Theres a race to community immunity so that the coronavirus becomes less able to spread by having fewer available hosts. But we have to do this by centering equity. If we lose this race, the virus will continue to spread and mutate. We can only run as fast as trust will allow, and so its a process of building and rebuilding trust while accelerating the vaccination effort. Its unlike anything Ive read about either in public health or in history. If too few people of color are vaccinated, we cant get to community immunity.

Chahine: And weve already seen that so far, vaccination has been yet another failure in health equity and racial equity. Already, the data shows that in communities of color, that there are fewer vaccination spots and more barriers to vaccination. Were falling short.

In order to be equitable, more investment needs to be made in tackling the barriers, not just the number of vaccination sites, but also people having assistance signing up for vaccinations and with transportation, thinking about where youre going to locate it. What if people dont have a car? What if people dont have a smartphone or internet?

Bremby: One of the challenges in this process, and well continue to hear this until we solve it, is that we are not adequately capturing enough data on whos being vaccinated. In the first report issued by the CDC, almost half of the 12 million people who were vaccinated did not report, or the data was not captured, regarding their race or ethnicity. So we truly dont know how many within that first 12 million U.S. residents were vaccinated by race and ethnicity. Many systems dont capture that at all.

And I was taught early on in my local government career that what matters gets measured. And so if we truly value equitable distribution of this vaccine, well be more intentional about measuring vaccination rates at racial and ethnic level. We will design our systems in a way to capture that critical informationwhile respecting the wishes of the individual if they choose to not disclose it. But, we should give them the opportunity to disclose and inform them of the value of disclosure so that we can have better data to inform our collective progress.

Chahine: You mentioned trust. Can you speak to the historical roots of that lack of trust in communities of color?

Bremby: Yes. There is a lack of trust endemic within the Black American community towards health and healthcare systems. Historically, there has been experimentation, if you will, on people of color. There have been incidents of people taking and using black bodies, for medical and other experimentation. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where Black men with syphilis were not told of their diagnosis nor treated to permit researchers to understand the course of this affliction. And then the Henrietta Lacks story, about the DNA of a woman being used for scientific research for decades without the family even knowing that her DNA had been used in this way. Those are historical incidents.

What is current, consistently, in the present day, is that there is health inequity exists in most areas that you look. There are stories about people of color being treated differently in emergency departments, where theyre undertreated for pain. Not too many months ago, a physician that had contracted the coronavirus was turned away from the very hospital in which she practiced because they thought perhaps her condition wasnt as dire, but the diagnostics werent applied with the same rigor. An advocate on her behalf actually got her admitted to her own hospital, where she subsequently died. But that shined a recurring light on the fact that health inequity continues to persist, regardless of affluence, regardless of knowledge, or education. Its something that we have got to wrestle with and get our arms around as a culture.

Getting the messages out that people of color were a part of the vaccine trials, that the vaccines are effective, that there is no unintended harm or intentional harm for people of colorthose are the types of messages that need to be exposed, as well as communicated back into the community through trusted members like clergy, teachers, neighbors, and other community leaders.

Chahine: Just this morning, I found out that I have a paper accepted for publication thats about building trust in public-private partnerships. What are the success factors in building trust? Four main patterns emerged when we looked at interviews among participants, which is that results matter, people matter, context matters, and alignment of goals matters.

How do you build trust? With results. You plan for deliverables that are attainable. And you need to plan for short-term and long-term deliverables because when something is delivered, that builds trust. It cant be something abstract. You have to deliver.

The second thing is that it really matters who the person is. Its not just the institution. People trust a person. Its the people who build trust, so its really important who the people are that are orchestrating and implementing these partnerships. The third one is that context matters, so its going to be different in an urban versus rural area, or in two different states, or two different countries. For example, in one country, the interviewees said, Why would I trust the private sector? Theyre not interested in my health. Its the governments job. Health is a human right. And I trust the government. Whereas in another country, it was actually the exact opposite. They said, I dont trust the government. The government has failed me, has given me nothing. But the private sector actually knows what its doing. I buy products from this company. They deliver products to my village, so I trust in their competency.

And then the fourth one was the alignment of goals. You cannot build partnerships unless your goals are actually aligned and your incentives are aligned. And I think in this case, they are. We will all lose if we fail this. And we all have something to gain by getting it right.

Bremby: Absolutely. It so aligns with some of the conversations I just had with our team, and our reflections about the last year. We were asking people to show up with customers with persistent empathy. Its not just enough to be empathetic, but be persistent. This is not a selling cycle. This is an opportunity to get to know the customer and their pain points, to become a trusted advisor. In those instances where we were able to do so, we developed great relationships and were able to help facilitate tremendous outcomes.

Interestingly enough, the role component that you mentioned is very important. If we are not seen as worthy of anothers trust, it delays our ability to generate speed to value.

Chahine: When you think about the role of the private sector in health equity, people could say, Well, its a supply chain. Its a vendor. How is this conscious capitalism? How is this partnership? Well, there are different ways of engaging. You can be involved in something in a very extractive way, where youre not interested in building equity and youre not interested in building power. And you could be involved in something as a trusted advisor, as a long-term partner. Everything thats happened over the last year just highlights how much all sides have at stake in building those partnerships, and the impact they can have on society when successful.

Learn more about the Yale SOM case study examining the turnaround of CT SNAP.

Go here to see the original:

Bringing Private-Sector Values to the Public Sectorand Vice Versa - Yale Insights

Last year brought us the COVID Pandemic, but it was also the year that America confronted racism head-on. After the murder of George Floyd, I reached out to my colleague Derrick Johnson, director of diversity programs with Talley Management Group. We decided that event planners should be empowered to affect real change in the business of events, so we founded Events: From Black to White, a free weekly (now monthly) open online discussion on all things equity in the meetings industry.

We felt that by giving the events community a safe space to come together to talk, listen, learn, educate and ideate solutions was a start to eradicating racism in the industry and at our events. Weve learned some incredible lessons along the way that I want to share:

Start Small

The overarching theme in these conversations is that people feel overwhelmed, and sometimes inadequate, in finding a place to start tackling such a huge issue. Most people are looking for clear instructions on how to get there. Our answer is always to start small.

If you feel like you need education, search for webinars, join our discussion or reach out to your organizations to better understand their diversity plans. Reach out to organizations like the Events Industry Council that has put together their Equity Task Force and make sure to stay tuned for their offerings.

Make sure to speak up if you see something in your organization or at events you attend. For example, if a group that you follow is always posting events with non-diverse speakers, reach out to management and challenge them to diversify their line-ups. Sign up for Anti-Racism Daily, a wonderful newsletter with daily resources, websites and action items that you can contribute to immediately.

Be Measurable and Intentional

In a recent episode of our podcast, we had a bit of a breakthrough. Event planners have a ton of power to be intentional and choose partners that align with diverse missions. It can start as simply with your RFP process. Add your diversity statement to your RFP and more importantly, ask vendors/partners for their statements. Ask them actively what they are doing in their space to diversify events. Choose partners that want to affect change and will work to diversify the workforce and your community.

Join the Conversation and Own Your Power!

What event planners often forget in our daily work is that we truly have the power to change the world. Events reach just about everyone on the planet. From weddings to concerts to trade shows, people love to attend events. We now even have an even bigger reach with virtual platforms. We are able to source more diverse audiences, speakers, vendors, members and partners than ever before! We can show representation on our stages, in our boards and planning committees and, ultimately, in the communities that we reach during live events. The possibilities are endless and we truly have the power to change the world, one meeting planner and one event at a time.

Read more:

Diversity and Events - TSNN Trade Show News

Content Warning: This article discusses gender-based violence. Gender-based violence refers to harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms.

I write this article in honor of the survivors of gender-based violence filing the class-action lawsuit against the University of Michigan for allowing former U-M athletic doctor Robert E. Andersons decades of abuse to continue unabated, and for all other survivors of gender-based violence. This story belongs to them and to all of the survivors who go unheard and continue to be failed by oppressive systems, which perpetuate violence and inequity against marginalized groups on this campus, in this country and across the globe.

I am no expert; I do not hold all the answers to solve this complex, nuanced issue. I write this, first and foremost, to call for justice for survivors, a form of justice defined solely by them and what they need to heal, varying on a case-to-case basis. They deserve better.

To all survivors, thank you for protecting all of us in filing this suit. The University knew of this abuse and failed all of you and the rest of our community by enabling it. If the University cares about its students, it would take responsibility for this unimaginable injury and validate these survivors.

Second, I write this as a call to myself and all of us to continue to reckon with the reality of gender-based violence, a reality we construct and maintain, and to start to think of and pursue solutions to deconstruct it. I hope this op-ed encourages further debate, reflection and action when it comes to addressing and dismantling the oppressive systems that create gender-based violence.

***

Zoom In.

Case I: Former U-M provost Martin Philbert sexually harassed multiple people over two decades throughout his entire career at the University while rising in ranks from professor to dean to provost, the head of the office that oversees cases of gender-based violence. University officials, including President Mark Schlissel, knew of the rumors, now proven true, circulating about Philberts misconduct and failed to launch investigations until the 2018-2019 school year.

Case II: More than 150 survivors have come forward, filing individual lawsuits and a class-action lawsuit, against the University in response to the Universitys handling of sexual abuse of students by former athletic doctor Robert E. Anderson dating back to the 1960s. The University has received over 460 complaints against Anderson. Worst of all, former football coach Bo Schembechler and former athletic director Don Canham allegedly knew about Andersons actions and failed to do anything in response at the time. Anderson worked until his retirement in 2003, despite being demoted for his behavior in 1979.

Case III: The Michigan Daily uncovered 40 years of harassment and sexual misconduct allegations against Stephen Shipps, School of Music, Theatre & Dance faculty member.

Case IV: Employees at Clinc, an artificial intelligence start-up, made allegations of sexual misconduct against Jason Mars, Clincs CEO and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University; some faculty wrote a statement calling for Mars to take a leave of absence. He taught an undergraduate course during the Winter 2021 semester.

Case V: In 2019, the University conducted a survey on sexual misconduct. Critical results include: 12.4% of women and 1.7% of men experience rape on campus; 20.4% of women and 4.2% of men experience nonconsensual sexual touching on campus; 34.3% of undergraduate women remain most at risk for experiencing nonconsensual touching and penetration on campus; 17% of undergraduates, and 26.4% of women, experience unwanted kissing and sexual touching prior to coming to the University; 6.7% of undergraduates, and 10.6% of women, experience unwanted penetration or oral sex prior to coming to the University. Marginalized groups, including women, transgender students, genderqueer or nonbinary students and students with disabilities, are the most at risk for experiencing unwanted sexual behaviors (stalking, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence and rape).

Case VI: English professor Douglas Trevor cannot conduct undergraduate office hours with his door closed nor hold U-M leadership positions for two years in light of allegations of harassment.

Case VII: The University placed EECS professor Peter Chen on administrative leave following criminal charges for sexual misconduct with a minor.

***

When I contemplated joining a class-action lawsuit against the University of Michigan in support of survivors of gender-based violence perpetrated by a University official, I knew I needed to sign my name on the line. No matter how long I thought about it, no matter the amount of anxiety throbbing deep in my gut, I understood my privilege in that I, fortunately, never experienced gender-based violence myself. By signing, I would not endanger myself nor be forced to recall a traumatic experience.

Because, fortunately, it did not happen to me.

I write this with a hot face and shaking hands. Not because I fear response to this piece, but it is my fear of the meaning of fortunately meaning it could happen to me that terrifies me. This fortuity acts as a coping mechanism because gender-based violence does not come down to fortune nor random happenstance.

Fortuity ignores intentionality. It ignores the intentional construction of systems of oppression institutions, structures, behaviors and norms perpetuating sexism, racism, classism and other forms of oppression that root themselves deeply in society. It ignores how these oppressive, patriarchal systems socialize us and pervade our culture. It ignores the way these systems enable privileged individuals and allow them to commit heinous acts while facing no consequences but condemns those with less privilege and silences survivors. It ignores our broken legal and mass incarceration systems that fail survivors while propagating further violence inside and outside prison walls.

***

Zoom Out.

Thirteen percent of all undergraduate and graduate students experience rape or sexual assault on higher education campuses across the country. For undergraduate students, 26.4% of women and 6.8% of men experience rape or sexual assault on higher education campuses; among graduate students, these numbers are 9.7% of women and 2.5% of men. College-aged students are at higher risk for gender-based violence, and gender-based violence is more prevalent than other crimes on higher education campuses. On average, 463,634 individuals age 12 or older are victims of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States; every 68 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in America. Individuals ages 12 to 34 are more at risk of experiencing gender-based violence. One in six American women has been raped or experienced a rape attempt. 82% of juvenile people who experienced gender-based violence are women and 90% of people who are raped are women. About 3% of men have been raped or experienced a rape attempt. Twenty-one percent of transgender students have been sexually assaulted.

The criminal legal and mass incarceration systems meant to uphold justice for survivors often fail: Out of 1000 sexual assaults, 975 perpetrators walk free. However, a majority of sexual assaults go unreported; only 310 out of every 1000 sexual assaults are reported to the police. According to Danielle Sered in her 2019 book Until We Reckon, people who face incarceration experience high rates of violence inside and outside prisons. A 2007 survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that 60,500 people incarcerated in state and federal prisons were sexually abused in the twelve months prior to the survey. Authors Susan Burton and Cari Lynn share in the 2017 book Becoming Ms. Burton that approximately 94% of women who are incarcerated experienced physical or sexual abuse. BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks bear a heightened risk of experiencing gender-based violence.

***

I could list more statistics and facts, but numbers and objective statements can be easily ignored. The person who commits harm could be anyone: a friend, a family member, a stranger on the street, a teacher, a counselor, a prison guard or, in this case, a doctor. People you should trust commit these harmful acts.

We continue to blame individuals, their injurious and painful behavior and moral ineptitude, but fail to also blame the systems that raised these people. Yes, we must hold individuals accountable for harm. But we must also hold our society accountable for not preventing harm in the first place, reproducing harm (such as in the sexual assault reporting process, in the prison system, etc.) and failing to rectify harm.

Gender-based violence appears in our streets, in our homes, in our schools, in our hospitals and places of care, in our work environments and in the legal and mass incarceration systems. It affects all groups, some those with marginalized identities more than others, reinforcing existing disparities. And it is only when we step back and view these not as individual, isolated incidents, but collective, systemic consequences of reproduced oppressive systems of power, that we can fully eradicate gender violence at all levels of society.

Collectively, those with privileged identities and experiences must particularly speak out against gender violence. We must destigmatize coming forward. We must empower and support survivors. We must break down the poisonous culture of toxic masculinity that proliferates aggression, violence, lack of respect, suppression of emotions and the silencing of survivors. We must support individuals with substance abuse addictions or those who engage in high amounts of drinking and drug use, as drug and alcohol use plays an important role in the perpetuation of gender violence and in coping with victimisation among women. Again, I do not hold all the answers. We face a beast of intertwined systems. But we can start with ourselves internal change, growth of consciousness and transformation and our communities. At the University of Michigan, this class-action lawsuit can be a start, necessitating justice for the survivors and systemic, institutional change. We do not want band-aid fixes; we demand that the University honor the survivors wishes, re-evaluating and transforming itself from the inside out.

As a society, we must ask ourselves, what does justice look like and what are alternatives to the current ways we address this issue, among many other issues of violence? In other words, what are alternatives, like restorative justice, to the justice of our current, ineffective criminal-legal system that destroys relationships, instead of mediating them, and reproduces harm? And how can we adopt cultural and structural changes to prevent gender-based violence in the first place?

To end, two powerful quotes from a powerful activist, Dr. Angela Davis:

Rape bears a direct relationship to all of the existing power structures in a given society. This relationship is not a simple, mechanical one, but rather involves complex structures reflecting the interconnectedness of the race, gender, and class oppression that characterize the society. If we do not comprehend the nature of gender-based violence as it is mediated by racial, class, and governmental violence and power, we cannot hope to develop strategies that will allow us eventually to purge our society of oppressive misogynist violence.

We will never get past the first step in eliminating the horrendous violence done to women in our society if we do not recognize that rape is only one element in the complex structure of womens oppression. And the systematic oppression of women in our society cannot be accurately evaluated except as it is connected to racism and class exploitation at home and imperialist aggression and the potential nuclear holocaust that menace the entire globe.

Josie Graham is a junior in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and can be reached at josiekg@umich.edu.

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Beyond empty promises: Why I signed onto the class action lawsuit against UM for students affected by Robert Anderson - The Michigan Daily