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U.S. Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Funders' Briefing Program, January 19, 2021

2021; Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1089/heq.2021.29006.trht

2473-1242

Gail C. Christopher, La Quen Náay Liz Medicine Crow, Melanie Greenberg, La June Montgomery Tabron, Paul Zeitz, Antti Pentikainen, J Rico, Tia Brown McNair, Angela Waters Austin, Charles Chavis, Isaiah Oliver, Diane Hosey, Grace Hou, Andreas Hipple, Srikanth Gopal, Marcus Anthony Hunter, Hannah Adamson,

Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership

Health EquityVol. 5, No. 1 Special Collection on Leadership for Truth, Racial Healing, and Health Equity: Expert Panel DiscussionOpen AccessCreative Commons licenseU.S. Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Funders' Briefing Program, January 19, 2021Moderators: Gail C. Christopher, La Quen Náay Liz Medicine Crow, Melanie Greenberg, Participants: La June Montgomery Tabron, Paul Zeitz, Antti Pentikainen, José A. Rico, Tia Brown McNair, Angela Waters Austin, Charles Chavis, Isaiah Oliver, Diane Hosey, Grace Hou, Andreas Hipple, Srikanth (Srik) Gopal, Marcus Anthony Hunter, and Hannah AdamsonModerators: Gail C. ChristopherCo-Chair, USTRHT, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Executive Director, National Collaborative for Health Equity, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, La Quen Náay Liz Medicine CrowPresident and CEO, First Alaskans Institute, Anchorage, Alaska, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Melanie GreenbergManaging Director, Humanity United, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Participants: La June Montgomery TabronPresident and CEO, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, East Battle Creek, Michigan, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Paul ZeitzSearch for more papers by this author, Antti PentikainenSecretary, USTRHT, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Director, Mary Hoch Center for Reconciliation, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, José A. RicoExecutive Director, Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Greater Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Tia Brown McNairVice President, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Angela Waters AustinFounder, President, and CEO, One Love Global, Lansing, Michigan, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Charles ChavisCo-Chair, USTRHT, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Arlington, Virginia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Isaiah OliverPresident and CEO, Community Foundation of Greater Flint, Flint, Michigan, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Diane HoseyPhilanthropic Outreach, Embrey Family Foundation, Dallas, Texas, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Grace HouSecretary, Illinois Department of Human Services, Chicago, Illinois, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Andreas HippleExecutive Director, Better Way Foundation, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Srikanth (Srik) GopalManaging Partner, Humanity United, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Search for more papers by this author, Marcus Anthony HunterCo-Chair, USTRHT, Washington, District of Columbia, USA.Professor, UCLA Department of African American Studies, Los Angeles, California, USA.Search for more papers by this author, and Hannah AdamsonStudent, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:22 Sep 2021https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2021.29006.trhtAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail Opening RemarksModerator: Gail C. ChristopherParticipants: La June Montgomery Tabron, Paul Zeitz, and Antti PentikainenDr. Christopher: Welcome, everyone, to this briefing. We are honored to have La June Montgomery Tabron with us for just a few minutes. La June, I know W.K. Kellogg Foundation has been embedded, has led this work for decades. When you launched Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT), you reached out and had philanthropic partners in the local community. So I wonder whether you could tell us why you think that is important.Ms. Tabron: Thank you, Gail, and I do want to welcome everyone to this call as well. We are excited that there are other funders interested in this work and wanting to partner in this work. Today is our National Day of Racial Healing, and I am looking forward to the dialogue today and the continued dialogue. And what I will tell you is: We know that there are many people in communities that want to do this work. They are eager to do this work. And just this week, we have had over 400,000 people access our website to download the tools, the resource guides, and the information related to racial healing. So, I want to tell you that this is a very urgent need, a palpable need, right now, and people are coming into the movement. When we created this concept, first of all, we worked with partners. This was not anything that was created just within the walls of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. We wanted to support the efforts that were happening on the ground, and through those partnerships, what we know is this work is bigger than any one foundation, but it needs to be seated in community. And we knew that in order for the work to thrive in communities, we needed many partners, and this work could not be owned by an entity or even a particular space. We knew it needed to be nationwide, it needed to be a movement. And the movement is growing, and our show, the National Day of Racial Healing program today, will show you that this work is happening on the ground throughout the nation.Dr. Christopher: OK. And it is. And we are very excited with the support of possibly congress, and maybe even the administration. Who knew our country would be so shattered, and it would require some real in-depth healing? But one quick question, La June: People think this work does not lead to concrete outcomes, to policy changes. Could you speak of that very briefly?Ms. Tabron: Yes. Again, on our program today you will see how communities have taken this work and made changes in their communities. One particular community, Kalamazoo, will talk about how they used the pillars of the TRHT, one of which was housing, and separation, and they have since changed legislation in their community as it relates to housing policy. So, the work is real, and again, it starts with truth telling. And what you will find is when communities have come together and faced their truths, but they have been very inclusive and how they have allowed stories to unfold around what is happening in their communities, what we see is great outcomes. You will hear from Buffalo, talking about how they approached workforce development in their community and changed, again, policies and work with corporate America to make sure that people do have the opportunities. So people hear “healing,” and what we know is “healing” is a very difficult word, but more importantly, it gets to system change work, and that is where the work really hits the ground, and that is where we see the transformation happening. And it is real. It is happening all over the nation, and as Gail mentioned, we hope it will happen at the federal level as well. And there is great progress going on in that regard, as well.Dr. Christopher: La June, I know you have a full plate on this Fifth Annual National Day of Racial Healing, so please accept my heartfelt appreciation for taking just a few moments to share your sentiments and the sentiments of the foundation as we move forward in our briefing today.Ms. Tabron: Thank you so much, Gail, for inviting me. And as I say, this is the real work that has to happen. Racial healing for us is at the heart of racial equity, and you cannot skip the healing work. So, thank you for your leadership, Gail, and thank you, all the funders, for joining, and let us hope that there is a lot of work we can do together in the future.Dr. Christopher: And I want to also—she mentioned it, but at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation website, they will be commemorating this day all day, and it will be available, and you will be hearing from many of the local partners. So, this lets us know—she let us know—something about the scope and the scale of the work. From the very beginning, we reached out to local philanthropic associations, we reached out to community foundations, to private foundations, family foundations, because foundations should be critical catalysts for this work around the country. Philanthropy means, literally, love of humanity, and we need more expressions of love of humanity in these critical times. I am going to invite my colleagues Antti and Paul to come in now and just give another insight into the national effort. Paul and Antti?Dr. Zeitz: Thank you, Gail—and thank you, everyone. I am truly honored and humbled to be part of this community and to have this opportunity to share some thoughts with you today. As we heard already, a grassroots community local movement is already under way after a decade of work by the Kellogg Foundation and by many other agencies and entities supporting TRHT and other racial justice and equity efforts. And building on those efforts, we have the opportunity and responsibility to strengthen a blossoming U.S. movement that is poised to really accelerate the journey to lasting racial justice, equity, and healing. And we are building a TRHT movement in the United States at the national, state, and local levels. Building on all that work, Gail and Marcus, who you will hear from later, and others worked with Congresswoman Barbara Lee over a couple-year period. And in the wake of the George Floyd murder, she decided on June 4 to introduce H.Con.Res. 100, which was a resolution calling for the formation of a U.S. Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission. She introduced that with 112 cosponsors, including representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Native American and Indigenous Caucus, Asian Americans, and a broad range of leaders in the congress. And at that time, Shelly Marc, her deputy chief of staff, asked all of us—myself and others, who are doing advocacy work—to form a coalition to really get behind the resolution. And over the 6 months of last year, from June until December, we were able to mobilize 170 cosponsors of that resolution in the House of Representatives. At the same time, Congresswoman Lee had brokered a partnership in the Senate with then-Senator Kamala Harris, and she had studied and reviewed and had agreed to introduce a sister resolution in the Senate. When she was selected to become the vice-presidential nominee, she passed the baton to Senator Cory Booker, and he introduced a sister resolution in the Senate, S.Con.Res. 50, in early December, and within a short amount of time there were 13 Senators who had joined on before the session ended in the 116th Congress. At the same time, we have been building the movement. We now have over 229 organizations that are supporting this call for a national commission. This includes many of you, who are involved with local TRHT initiatives, universities, historically Black colleges and universities, civic groups such as the NAACP Leadership Conference and Cobra, faith groups such as Sojourners, the Religious Action Center; and a broad range of youth activists as well, including March For Our Lives, joined the movement during the fall of past year. We are also mobilizing celebrities and artists through the Black Music Action Coalition and the #breathewithme Revolution, which is where I work on their leadership team. Just yesterday, we released a video on Now This (Now This Politics' Instagram page) with Alicia Keys and Mary J. Blige and many other top artists calling for the Biden–Harris Administration to launch a commission in their first 100 days. I would say this group—the leadership group that you will be hearing from—has had successful interactions with the Biden–Harris transition team, and we are hopeful that this moment that everyone is aware of will—that this is an idea whose time has come, it is urgently needed to ensure longstanding racial equity in our country. There are lots more to say about our work, but I will pass it on to Antti now. Thank you.Mr. Pentikainen: Thank you, Paul, and I want to say how honored I have been to work with you and Dr. Gail Christopher. Gail has had incredible wisdom and contribution, and you, Paul, have done incredible work. I think the video that is just released yesterday must have gotten more than a million views at this point. I also want to recognize in the call my previous boss, Nancy Lindberg from U.S. Institute of Peace, when we both were there, and also my current boss, Alpaslan Özerdem, who is the dean of the Carter School (for Peace and Conflict Resolution) at George Mason University. I lead a center at the Carter School that is studying how to make these processes more effective in assisting those who are leading the designing of these processes, and I have just three points I want to make from that perspective. One is that those historical moments when these processes become possible are rare, and most often those opportunities are lost, so it is highly timely for this nation and everybody who wants to back this to get organized and to support those efforts. My second point is that processes that are focusing on commissions and commission reports fail to deliver transformative change, so what needs to happen in the nation throughout this country has to be planned on the onset. And my third point is that every community, every nation, and every context has to design this process based on their own language, their own history, and their own actors, and I think the United States is extremely fortunate to have had these efforts spearheaded by the Kellogg Foundation, but also the leadership by Gail Christopher, that it can build on a nationwide movement that is being done and work that is being done. And so, looking forward, finally, I am happy to share that the extent of these efforts—and Hannah, if you can show the maps—is nationwide. (Two maps side by side under the title Mapping of Current Initiatives: (1) U.S. Truth and Reconciliation Initiatives and (2) U.S. Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Initiatives). Besides these efforts that are being led at the campus centers, that Tia will later speak about in the next panel, we also have an emerging list of commissions, I think more than 40 local commissions, being initiated that quickly need support and learning to move forward. So that would be my number one suggestion to help them to learn from each other. And second, I do not think a national process in this country so wide and so complex can succeed without benefiting from knowledge that is working on the grassroots. So, I close here, and I hand it over to fellow leader, our incredible leader from First Alaskans Institute, Liz Medicine Crow, and thank you for also your leadership in showing and modeling in Alaska how this work can be built on in its practices and mainstreamed in these efforts. Over to you, Liz, to lead our first panel.Panel on Local InsightsModerator: La Quen Náay Liz Medicine CrowParticipants: José A. Rico, Tia Brown McNair, Angela Waters Austin, and Charles ChavisMs. Liz Medicine Crow: Gunalchéesh (“Thank you” in Tlingit)! How are you? Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. In my Tlingit language, we say: Yak'éi Ts'ootaat! Good morning! In my Haida language, we say: Sángaay láagang, good day. I am Tlingit and Haida, and I come from the community of Keex Kwaan (Kake), which is in the heart of southeast Alaska, in the heart of the Tongass National Rainforest. And I am so honored to be able to spend a few moments with you today. But I am really here to introduce to you some incredible leaders, and I want to get right to it. I would like to introduce José Rico, who is executive director for the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Greater Chicago. José brings the concept of solidarity between Black and Brown and all communities to life in Chicago as they partner to implement the TRHT strategy. I would also like to introduce Dr. Tia Brown McNair, vice president in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and the executive director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Campus Centers at the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. Tia is the driving force helping to creatively actualize the vision for transformation and racial healing on college campuses across America. I would also love to introduce to you one of my fellow place leads—and I am so excited that I get to see her and hear her today—Angela Waters Austin, who is the president and chief executive officer of One Love Global, and the founder, producer, and host of Equity Equals radio show across Michigan. Angela embodies the idea of success against the odds in implementing a comprehensive TRHT strategy in the capital city of Lansing, Michigan. And of course, Dr. Charles Chavis, cochair of USTRHT, vice-chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, assistant professor at George Mason University. Charles is the local leader in Maryland and here at George Mason University. He is courageously combining academic excellence with community organizing to bring truth about historic lynching to the work of racial healing and achieving justice. And more about them are in your briefing program, but I just wanted to warmly welcome all the panelists to our first panel, which is really focusing on local insights. The question that I have for our panelists to get us going is: What has changed as a result of this work? How do you know this? And what does it mean for your community?Mr. Rico: Thank you, Liz. Three years ago, when we started this work here in Chicago, we convened dozens of community-based organizations to help us design how this was going to look here in the city, and we got a good response from several hundred leaders. We trained about 40 racial healing practitioners; came up with a plan of how we wanted to make the changes in policy, in the economy, in some of the racial justice reform efforts that were very important for us here in Chicago; and we started doing about 30 circles per year to get people to understand the methodology but also what our transformation agenda would be. We were on a really good path: the metropolitan area is about eight million people, and hundreds of institutions were doing this work, so we got a good start. Now, what you see is that we see the four different sectors in our community really have adopted the TRHT framework in our city. We have hundreds and thousands, hundreds of community-based organizations throughout the city that are being part of the racial healing circles. We have thousands of individuals who this year, even though the pandemic was on, virtually participated in racial healing circles. Today, we have—a thousand people logged on the National Day of Racial Healing from 10 am to 3 pm. And the only reason we could only do a thousand is because we have 200 racial healing practitioners doing live circles as we speak. We have the government sector, both the state launch, the multimillion-dollar Solidarity Heals program so people in all Illinois could be part of the TRHT framework, and the city also just launched—and next week is doing—a public policy conference called “Together We Heal” using the TRHT framework. I was in a panel presentation with Dr. Gail Christopher yesterday with 200 businesses here in Chicago that the United Way sponsored, and earlier today I was in another panel presentation with the Chicago Community Trust where the business community wants to raise $500 million on the Together We Rise corporate initiative to implement the transformation and the repair that is needed from the harm that an economy based on suffering has caused. So we have come a long way. People at this moment in time see the framework as something that is viable, and in a big city like Chicago, different places are implementing different parts of the framework, and I am really excited about how we bring it all together in a cohesively unified front.Dr. McNair: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I just want to say thank you to the planning committee and to the leadership of Dr. Gail Christopher who I admire so much for the visionary work that she is doing on the TRHT effort. I just want to say for us at AAC&U—and that is the Association of American Colleges & Universities—we know that change cannot be sustained without intentionality and accountability, and for us at AAC&U, we believe that lasting change is very focused and a priority for our students, the next generation of leaders, to be prepared, to be fully prepared, to be the strategic leaders and thinkers to dismantle the false belief in a hierarchy of human value, to build just and equitable communities. And that is our goal of the TRHT Campus Centers is to really work collaboratively with faculty, administrators, community partners, students, and community activists, to really focus on what it means to have just and equitable communities. And along with our President, Lynn Pasquerella, and myself, we are honored to serve as part of the design team for the national TRHT effort. And in 2017, AAC&U partnered with the very first Penn TRHT campus—and Liz, you were there, and thank you so much for being there, part of that effort. And we are working with them on visionary goals, but also action plans, comprehensive action plans, focused on the work that they need to do within the institution and in the communities to achieve our shared goals. We often say that TRHT, the work of TRHT does not replace existing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at campuses, but it makes a deep connection with what we value at AAC&U as part of being liberally educated, that we are speaking across differences, the civility that we do not see as often as we need to within our country, the healing, the deep listening, the empathy, and the action. We now have over 28—we have 28 partner institutions working with us; that reaches hundreds and thousands of institutions across this country. And we are working with them to build—we have the centers. We have TRHT Campus Center institutes every year in June, where they come together. We have had over 108 institutions participate in that. Over 400 practitioners have been prepared to facilitate our racial healing circles. And what we are also doing is we have partnerships with our national evaluators at the summer institute who develop comprehensive assessment and evaluation plans, because as you have already heard from my colleagues this morning, we have to be focused on action, we have to be focused on accountability, and we have to be focused on change. So, I just want to say that we are developing resources and tools, as I close out. We are developing resources and tools with our higher education partners on stages of implementation: campus, client, and assessment tools based on the TRHT framework. All of our campuses are developing strategies for examining narrative about TRHT within their communities and at their institutions. So, we are very excited about this work, we are excited to be in partnership, we know that it is necessary, and we believe that it is important for change to happen. Thank you.Ms. Liz Medicine Crow: Thanks so much, Dr. Tia. Next, we will hear from Angela Waters Austin, followed by Dr. Charles. Angela, good morning.Ms. Austin: Good morning, sister. Thank you so much. It is so good to see your face and hear your voice. And greetings to you all from the wintry land of Lansing, Michigan, where the National Guard is camped out. Really interesting times. So, as we talk about movement and racial healing, I heard Dr. Christopher say that we could not have anticipated this, but I believe that she did. I remember back in Carlsbad, California, there were a few words that I heard that I left feeling fully committed. One was jettison, and I knew that a Trekkie was before me, and I heard movement, and I am like, “Yeah, I'm all about the movement, obviously.” What you did not hear is that I am also a local, statewide, and national, a global leader and cofounder in Black Lives Matter, and so that is an orientation that I bring into this work that is really important in terms of the local context and how we approach the work. Another word that I heard was calling. I heard love. To have these words spoken in a room about policy—ultimately the goal is policy and structural transformation, which is why we are having conversations about legislation and doing that deep work to uproot and jettison the systems of White supremacy that have had us bound and that cause harm to every person. Black and Brown and Indigenous people are harmed by White supremacy, but we have got to know that we are all harmed, and that we all have room and opportunity and space to heal, and that is what I love so much about TRHT. When I first saw the TRHT framework, what leapt off the page is that it is an organizing framework, and that has been our approach in metro Lansing as well as through our partnerships across the state of Michigan with the other TRHT sites, and with the other organizers and organizations that do deep movement work and that do deep policy work. And what this has really been for us is an opportunity to bring the grassroots movement into space with the institutional and systemic work that we have been doing in our community for the better part of a decade. And so, building that trust, healing circles have allowed us to build trust and to create and hold space for people to hear stories and to share narratives and to understand that we all carry pain, we all carry trauma. And for us to understand what alliance can look like, to understand what relationship can look like, to really understand that we are the change that we want to see, that we are the actors and the agents of the transformation, so that beautiful space, and so we call our—we kicked off Beloved Community this week. And so for us, to be in the middle of what looks like an attempted coup and what, our community is feeling really unsafe right now, we have folks that are holding healing circles in this particular moment. People are afraid, they do not know what is coming next. And to be able to have this tool that we have lived into and practiced into for the past three and a half years, we were ready. We were ready to say, “Let's pull it together. Let's create a space to hold our people right now.” And that is the beauty of TRHT, and I think you have picked up already, just hearing a few stories, that no TRHT is alike, because it is driven by community. It is driven by the unique makeup, it is driven by the unique culture, by the unique systems, and leaders and people, because it is all rooted in our hearts and in our minds and what we actually bring into the workspace. And so that is where the transformation begins. It begins on the inside, we bring it together, and we work together and we really have deep tough conversations, and I just want to applaud the Kellogg Foundation for accepting our proposal, because we named it, that it has to start with the grassroots, we have to honor the work that has already been done, and instead of TRHT coming in as something new or an umbrella, we said, “Let's create a platform where we can elevate that work, and honor those grassroots leaders, and actually elevate their work so that they could actually be seen and heard and powerful at the tables where institutional leaders are so comfortable making the decisions and calling the shots. “So, three and a half years, we have transformed our community into one that understands how important it is to follow Black and Indigenous leadership. That is the foundation for any possibility and endless transformation. And I am so excited to share that deep work with you. That means leadership development, our youth, our institutional leaders, our faith community, every sector. But the difference is, in our community we flip it on its head. It is not top down; it is bottom up. It is about how institutional leaders like yourselves actually come into relationship and listen and learn and actually cogovern and cocreate with community. I am so excited to be here with you today.Ms. Liz Medicine Crow: Thanks, Angela. That was beautiful. I appreciate hearing your voice, sister. Dr. Charles?Dr. Chavis: I am going to try to go behind those three amazing activist leaders. My name is Charles Chavis. As mentioned, I wear many hats, but one of the major projects I am focusing on is the work that I am doing as vice-chair of the Maryland Lynching Truth & Reconciliation Commission. It is the first state commission established in the United States dedicated to investigating racial terror lynchings that took place in the state and the country. And we worked extremely closely with members of the community, specifically in Maryland, throughout Maryland, around salvaging this history associated with the tragedy, the legacy of racial terror. And as we began to develop our framework and think about what type of commission we were going to be, something that I appreciated—I am so glad that I see a few people here that I recognize from Villanova University, where I attended the TRHT training—I was really drawn in by the narrative change piece of this. And as I went back to the state commission, I introduced them to the framework, and they were sold. And I think, for me, as someone who works directly with descendants of racial terror lynchings and victims, and these families, the truth-telling is so central, and we have to get that full information at the forefront of this work. As a historian, I see that White supremacy is allowed to thrive because of the suppression of narratives. And the narratives are suppressed, whether it is marginalized or communities that have been overlooked, and a lot of these things are given a license to continue and go on. And so, again, I think, for me and the work that we are doing on the gro