Robert Francis

State or Province:

CT

country:

USA

what are your gifts and talents?:

Group facilitation, program and strategy development, community organizing, understanding implicit bias, youth development, juveniel and adult criminal justice reform

why do you want to join abcd in action?:

I am rejoining

ABCD and Racial Equity -- 2 examples

user image 2021-03-14
By: Robert Francis
Posted in: Stories

Reducing Racial Disparity and what ABCD has to contribute…

March 14, 2021

 

In an effort to discover the power of utilizing ABCD principles and tools to reduce racial and ethnic disparity as well as polarization, I had two very informative conversations with George Terrell and Ron Dwyer-Voss, two of my fellow ABCDI stewards, about what they have done and are doing to address the issue through their ABCD work. George who lives in Valparaiso, Indiana where he lives and Ron in Rancho Cordova, California where he was asked to help. I hope their stories will spark conversations and action among ABCD practitioners in the cause of reducing polarization and racial and ethnic disparity in our communities and eventually much broader.

 Valparaiso, Indiana, is a small city of 30,000 people 85% White and 9% African American. In 1968 there were no Black people living in Valparaiso and when surveyed as to whether people would sell their home to a Black person, the answer was universally no! Valparaiso is a very conservative Republican city in one of the most Republican states in the country.

 A few years ago, George, who was concerned about the separation between the races and the underbelly of bias spoken and unspoken, started having get togethers in his home with the initial goal of raising community awareness of the effects of bias on their community. They read books like White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, The Groundwater Approach by Bayard Love and Deena Hayes-Greene and How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi and held discussed groups. The readings led to organizing and conducting community forums with over 200 people in attendance. As part of “Valparaiso Next,” a group concerned about the future of the city, they formed an Inclusion and Division Subcommittee; they did public relations and Black Lives Matter signs, posters and materials; they wrote editorials and spoke at public meetings; they monitored city council meetings and they formed a Police and Schools Work Group. Some of the more financially secure group members took out second mortgages and donated money to Black groups for them to more effectively do their work.

 They started their work with students and educated them about the effects of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow and separate but not so equal policies, Civil Rights legislation, the power and culture of the “N word” and how city and state policies impacted negatively on people of color. The students published articles and presented papers on the effects of racism and then took their new knowledge and grievances to the school board and the city’s leaders. Their work resulted in a ban on police chokeholds and new city policies on the duty to intervene and the duty to report acts of bias and violence in Valparaiso. They educated teachers and fostered curriculum changes to include the history and the effects that formal government policies had on Black people in America. In effect, they raised the community’s awareness about the effects of racism and bias on their community.

 The overriding theme of their work in the city was based on the principles of ABCD – inclusion building on the gifts of the young people and adults in their community; the power of diversity and how it makes everyone’s lives better, not just Black people; starting small and place based in a single neighborhood and collaboration between the citizens in the community and the powers at be to foster real change.

 In Rancho Cordova, a diverse suburb of Sacramento, California with 73,000 people, 55% white, 13% Black, 12% Asian and 20% Hispanic, Ron was asked by a by the city to support their staff working with the community to apply ABCD principles to identify the community’s gifts and apply those gifts to addressing the neighborhood’s concerns. This neighborhood was racially diverse with a large number of monolingual Spanish speaking residents affected by the highest crime rate in Rancho Cordova.

 All of the relationships that existed seem to be associated with the schools where students, parents, teachers and community leaders had relationships. Ron talked with students to identify their assets. Parents who wouldn’t go outside the home except for school or church were also invited to participate and to listen to their children. When the children were asked what they wanted to see in their community they said they wanted a soccer league where everyone could play. The adults in the community thought that the city should make it happen. City leaders having an overall thought that the quality of education was tied to the quality of the community asked what they could do. So the city provided balls, jerseys, other equipment and a place to play. The community on the other hand had to provide the coaches and other volunteers to organize the opportunities for the young people to play.

 Parents were then asked what they could do to promote community building and they suggested a festival drawing on the assets of the people who lived in the neighborhood. The city once again supplied 20 booths with materials for residents to set up the events. In return they required each booth to be staffed by two community residents, which involved 40 people from the neighborhood. The amazing thing about this was prior to this time, other agencies had trouble getting more than a handful of residents to work on anything at the school or in the community for its improvement. Even more amazing is that over 400 children and adults from the neighborhood showed up for the festival.

 The festival acted as a catalyst for greater community involvement and has a new sense of power for the residents. Some outcomes of the newfound power of the residents were a 75% reduction in crime in the neighborhood; increased home ownership, and a greater sense of the power of community control to have a positive impact on the quality of life in their neighborhood.

 These are only two examples of reduced polarization through the power of community and working from the assets of the people who live in the community working closely with city leaders. In Canada and Australia, they are approaching the issue of polarization between Anglo populations and indigenous peoples by forming national commissions which may even lead to reparations for past discrimination and subjugation.

 These examples provide proof of the power of community and the utilization of ABCD principles and practices to mobilize the assets of citizens to strengthen community. In addition, if you have a good story of utilizing ABCD to address polarization and racial inequity, please share it in response to this posting.

I will write soon about my example of working on juvenile justice reform efforts in Connecticut and how we used the ABCD principles of inclusion and community engagement to reduce mass incarceration and over-representation of youth of color in the criminal justice system.

 If you want to know more, you can reach George at george.terrell@yahoo.com, Ron at ron@pacificcommunitysolutions.com  and myself at robert.francis0212@gmail.com.

 

 

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John Hamerlinck
03/30/21 12:05:12PM @john-hamerlinck:

Thanks for sharing this, Robert. It's a good reminder that we can't train our way into a world of inclusion and equity. These goals require personal relationships, and a level of trust that can only result from the authenticity of those relationships. Well-meaning folks spent so much time talking about "diversity" (which is essentially just an exercise in counting), without an equal commitment to inclusion.

Diversity + Equal Access = Inclusion. The active engagement that you describe above demonstrates a real understanding of that.