The New York Urban League (NYUL) was founded in 1919, at the start of the Great Migration, to connect blacks who left the agricultural South with jobs in the industrial North. At the time, descendants of slaves poured into a metropolis where they had to fight against housing discrimination and boycott stores where black job applications weren’t accepted. Nearly a century later, Arva Rice, a NationSwell Council member and president of the New York Urban League, is continuing to fight for equality within New York City’s education system and job opportunities. NationSwell spoke to her recently about the ongoing fight for civil rights, as the nation’s first black president leaves office.
New York Urban League is approaching its centennial. What issues are you anticipating will be core to the league’s next century?
One challenge for us is how the conversation about race has changed over time. When I meet with others, I talk about the importance of this particular time in history. The fact that when I first came to the Urban League in April 2009, President Obama had just been elected and we were hearing, “You all have a president. That’s the ultimate level of equality.” Unfortunately, in the last seven years, we have also had Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and all things in between, like the intentional voter-suppression laws and attacks on the Voting Rights Act. The work we do is more critical than ever. There’s a generation that cares about racial equity, but we need to engage them in different ways. Maybe they want to march and be involved in grassroots movements, some want to be engaged in policy discussions and some want to become part of the establishment themselves and run for office. All of those ways are correct and right, and we have to figure out how to support that going forward.
Besides equal access to education and employment, the NYUL’s mission statement references working toward a “living environment that fosters mutual respect.” What does that mean to you?
Envisioning a world of mutual respect means that folks can not only tolerate but appreciate difference. I’m fascinated by how we define diversity and inclusion. Diversity is inviting people to a party, where inclusion is getting everyone to dance. I think that distinction is important, because to get everyone dancing, you have to think deliberately. You need to think about what is going to include people across generations, and most importantly, you need to be intentional in order to create environments that bring others to the fore. You have to be thoughtful, because it’s not going to happen by accident.
The racial biases pointed out by Black Lives Matter and the rising economic inequality in American cities were both on the minds of many voters last year. In what ways does New York reflect and buck the trends of what we expect from cities?
New York is often leading the way. We’re the ones who were really pushing for higher wages, with the Fight for 15 campaign. We’re also second place for technology and innovation. That’s why the New York Urban League is focusing some of our work on STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], giving young people the opportunity to not only play with technology but also be creators. There are some folks that say, “Oh, people of color aren’t interested in tech, because it’s not cool enough.” And I push back on that. This is not about being cool; this is about being accessible. Without having somebody who you know, any experience, any interaction with someone who works at Facebook, Google, Twitter, how can they know that’s something they can do? We’re helping to break through that, and then provide skills. The fact is that people of color will be passed over if, once again, they are not included in intentional ways. The reason why I feel privileged to lead a historic black organization is because you’re constantly focused on making sure that there really is equality. Until the day we feel like there truly is real parity, we’re not finished.
What have you learned about leadership during your time at NYUL?
I have learned that leadership is about doing things that make your stomach hurt. And that just because your stomach hurts doesn’t mean that you’re unusual. If you are doing it right and pushing yourself and the people that you manage and your stakeholders and your donors, there are going to be times when it’s uncomfortable. It’s a growth pattern. The other thing I’ve learned is that the only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones who aren’t doing anything. So I need to forgive myself for those times I made mistakes, figure out what I learned, dust myself off and go on to the next thing.
What are you most proud of having accomplished so far?
We have a program called Empowerment Days for our young people, which is basically Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work days. We take 200 girls and 150 boys on the first and last Friday of March, respectively. They’re able to go and meet people at places like O, The Oprah Magazine, black enterprises, the Yankees, Google and Microsoft. Basically, they spend the day with people who may look like them or have similar backgrounds and experiences, and find out how they got into those careers. And one of the reasons I’m so proud of that is because we have a level of access, as an organization that has a 97-year history of impact on communities. So I can call people and get my calls returned at a level that I wasn’t able to in any other position in my career. Every time we do an Empowerment Day, the young people are excited about a senior vice president or a receptionist that they met. That’s fantastic, because we would not be able to do that, if it were not for the relationships that the Urban League has within the city.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Continue reading “For This Century-Old Civil Rights Nonprofit, the Real Work Is Just Beginning”
Tag: African Americans
The Media Startup That’s Run By Black Millennials, For Black Millennials
In November, three days after the presidential election, African-American students at the University of Pennsylvania received racist texts through the messaging app GroupMe, including insults like “dumb slave,” a Nazi-inflected “Heil Trump” and a calendar event for a daily lynching. The New York Times ran a single sentence about the incident, buried in an article on A21; The Wall Street Journal gave it two. Online, at The Washington Post, quotes from administrators and UPenn College Republicans dominated the story.
Compare that to the way Blavity, a digital media company run by and for black millennials, handled it. They published a 1,473-word op-ed by Brian Peterson, the director of Makuu: Penn’s Black Cultural Center, about taking the hateful words as a call to action. Unlike the version so many national outlets ran, if they covered the news at all, Blavity centered the harassment on a black person’s experience.
With only 13 percent minority representation in newsrooms, headlines about African-Americans tend to skew toward extremes: Rihanna’s latest album on one end of the spectrum, gun violence in inner cities on the other. Blavity aims to provide a less sensational middle ground, depicting the multiplicity of ways to be black today. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the site reaches about 7 million unique visitors a month. And their core demographic, young people of color in America’s major cities, seem to like what they’re seeing: 38 percent of users make repeat visits.
“How does it feel to be stereotyped [in the media]? Sometimes, it feels bad. More often, it just feels false,” says Aaron Samuels, a poet and one of Blavity’s co-founders. “Watching news about black people that’s mass-marketed to non-black people, the facts are weird or the names are pronounced wrong. Or maybe the facts and names are right, but the story’s incomplete, and we’re not getting the entire perspective. That rings as inauthentic, and it makes people want to check out.”
A portmanteau of “black” and “gravity,” Blavity takes its name from a gathering spot for African-American students at Washington University in St. Louis, where the site’s four co-founders all earned their undergraduate degrees. Because black students are underrepresented at the institution, a table in the student center became the spot where they gravitated, says Jonathan Jackson, Blavity’s head of corporate brand. “We have to navigate spaces that we don’t own. When we find each other, we stick with each other,” he adds. As one of the few locations on campus where African-American students weren’t in the minority, the roundtable became a community nexus and a site for discussion.
Blavity, which launched in 2014, works much the same way, offering a chance to interact with writers and readers from similar backgrounds. “It looks like me, feels like me. I don’t have to bend who I am to be a part of it,” says Jackson.
Once there, surrounded by like-minded peers, readers’ identities deepen and grow more complex, according to the site’s co-founders. Blavity is not about bridging the divide between black and white, but rather exploring more nuanced differences between, say, a first-generation Ghanaian immigrant and someone with deep roots in Atlanta, between comic book–reading “blerds” (black nerds) and hip-hop fans.
“People assume that black folks don’t care about exploring this nuance, but the complexities are just as important as the similarities,” Jackson explains. “It gives a voice to people that we pretend don’t exist. ‘I’m a gamer but you don’t think I am, because you think gamers don’t look like me.’ This is not a subculture: We are the culture.”
To capture those diverse narratives, Blavity employs a team of 16 full-time writers. In addition, the company accepts op-eds and commissions freelance pieces from across the country. Their primary qualifications for contributors: “a quick pulse on what’s going on” and an ability to “translate that into meaningful conversation,” says Jackson.
Their stories delve into topics that receive little mainstream coverage, like black masculinity or the stigmas against mental healthcare. That’s not to say Blavity doesn’t cover the day’s dominant headlines, too: They devote plenty of space to Black Lives Matter and police brutality. But even there, the tech company has a different approach than most news organizations in that they refuse to share body-cam footage of officer-involved shootings, which they believe causes unnecessary psychological trauma.
To widen their reach, Blavity’s stable of reporters produces content on nearly every platform, whether it’s moderating a Twitter discussion on interracial dating, Instagramming the best black designers on Etsy or Snapchatting a tour of the African-American History Museum.
As America’s first black president leaves the White House, there’s much at stake for the black community. After his election, Barack Obama gave his first interview to Ebony, an African-American-owned publication. This past summer, the magazine, whose covers over its 71-year-history had been graced by the likes of Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin, was sold to a private equity firm — a sign, to observers, that black-owned media’s influence was slipping. Blavity’s recent success suggests the decline might simply have been generational. They prove there’s still a market and, more than ever, a need for news written by black writers for black audiences.
“We’ve been making and building things for a long time, but the ownership has not been ours in a meaningful way. Blavity is a medium to communicate our value,” says Jackson. “There’s never been a more critical time to have that than right now.”
Can Texting Help Improve Childhood Literacy?
Parents often have the best intentions to work with their young kids on the alphabet, rhyming words, and other literacy skills. But with the rush to make dinner and get the kids to bed, it can be difficult to carry through on those intentions.
In an effort to provide assistance, Stanford University researchers have developed a program that sends texts providing literacy-development tips to parents of preschoolers, and now, a new study shows that participating in the program improved the kids test scores. At a cost of less than $1 per parent, it’s an affordable intervention that catches parents at moments during the day when they just might find five minutes to squeeze in reading a book with their kids.
The researchers implemented a pilot program, called READY4K!, during the 2013-2014 school year at 31 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) preschools. These facilities that have long collaborated with Stanford as a sort of learning lab — testing the latest education techniques that the researchers develop. Of the 440 families with four-year-olds that participated in the program, half were sent literacy activity and fact texts three times a week such as, “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read,” according to Motoko Rich of the New York Times. The other half received texts with school announcements and other placebo messages.
The results? Parents who received the literacy prompts spent more time engaged in reading-related activities with their kids than those in the control group did. Plus, their kids achieved higher scores on literacy tests than did kids in the control group, and that group of parents engaged with teachers more, too.
Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, tells May Wong of Phys.org, “The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn’t knowledge or desire, but it’s the crazy, busy lives. It’s difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we’re helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.” She also notes, “We know that changing parental behaviors has proven to be very difficult, so to get these positive effects from our texting program was very exciting.”
What might be even more exciting is the fact that this technique works for low-income and minority families, whose children often enter kindergarten with a significant vocabulary gap compared to higher-income peers.
“Parents really are the first teacher that a student has and are the most important teacher at that [early] age,” Loeb tells Wong. “They don’t have to do it the way teachers do it; they just have to work things in with their daily life.”
MORE: A Training Program That Improves Preschoolers’ Attention Spans
With Odds Stacked Against Them, This Group Is Helping to Build Self-Esteem in Young Black Women
“Babies raising babies,” is how Tracey Wilson Mourning, a former journalist and wife of retired Miami Heat basketball player Alonzo Mourning, describes the group of teenage girls carrying their children near her neighborhood in Florida to The Root.
“I wondered, ‘Which one am I?’ out of that group, had it not been for the mommy I had, had it not been for the amazing women in my life,” she says.
This questioning led Mourning to start a mentoring group for young black women called Honey Shine.
Since 2002, the organization has been reaching out to young black women in Florida, offering group mentorship, a six-week summer day camp and bi-monthly workshops focused on education, health, nutrition, sex and drug education, and making goals for the future. The participants are called “Honey Bugs,” and sharing warmth and affection among the generations is a big part of Honey Shine’s mission.
Honey Shine turns even fun events into learning experiences. For example, a back-to-school shopping trip sponsored by Forever21 that helped 100 girls pick out clothes for school was also an opportunity to teach the Honey Bugs about budgeting and “shopping smart.”
Mourning tells The Root that these girls benefit from guidance in all aspects of their lives. “I know a lot of these young girls don’t have that mom that I had, don’t have those people pulling them up by their coattails or taking them outside of their neighborhoods,” she says. “We have girls that come from neighborhoods called ‘the Graveyard’ where two out of 12 are graduating from high school. Not on our watch.”
Most of all, Mourning wants Honey Shine to show the girls the possibilities that await them if they stay out of trouble and get an education: “[Women] run companies. We own companies. We influence the world,” Mourning says. “And if our girls see that, what a difference that makes. Self-esteem is a powerful tool. We all make dumb mistakes when our self-esteem is low, and I don’t know anyone immune from that, but I feel like if we build self-esteem in our young girls…it makes the world of difference.”
MORE: When These Low-Income Women Needed Help, They Found An Answer in Each Other
Can Mom-to-Mom Mentoring Save Babies’ Lives?
The infant mortality rate of the United States ranks a disappointing 50th in the world. And the outcome for minority babies tends to be worse: African-American babies are twice as likely to die in the first year, no matter the income level of their mothers.
So Kathryn Hall-Trujillo is working to reverse that with Birthing Project USA, a non-profit that she founded in 1988. When she was a public health administrator in California, Hall-Trujillo noticed that it cost $300,000 to care for a sick or low-birth-weight baby for three months. In comparison, it only cost $2,000 to give a baby’s mother proper prenatal care, which could help to prevent her baby’s illness.
Birthing Project USA pairs moms-to-be with experienced mom mentors who advise and support them during their pregnancies and the first year of their babies’ lives. Since African-American women are twice as likely not to receive prenatal assistance, the mentors with Birthing Project USA make sure the pregnant mothers they work with see a doctor regularly.
“The message that I would give to expecting mothers and expecting fathers is regardless of the circumstances of how you got pregnant it’s really important to remember that you are having an opportunity to carry a new life inside of you and bring that new life into the world,” Hall-Trujillo told NewsOne. “I remind women that they’re really sisters and can help each other have healthier babies.”
MORE: Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms
Meet the People Hoping to Change the Face of Immigration in America
You might not know it from watching the evening news, but immigration isn’t solely a Latino issue. In fact, there are more than 60 million first- and second-generation black Americans with immigrant backgrounds in the U.S. — each with a unique voice that yearns to be heard. Enter The Generation Project (otherwise known as The G Project), an innovative awareness campaign launched earlier this month by The Black Institute, which focuses on the successes and achievements that black immigrants and their descendants have contributed to the country. These so-called “Gs” emigrated from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean or South America. They all have distinct stories and backgrounds, and many of them have a vested interest in the ongoing fight for comprehensive immigration reform.
MORE: A New Weapon in the Immigration Wars: Hospitality
The G Project officially celebrated its launch last week at a high-profile panel headed by New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray. McCray, wife of newly seated mayor Bill de Blasio, is a second-generation immigrant, whose grandmother and grandfather emigrated from Barbados. “Now, I am a G-two, a second generation immigrant,” McCray said during the panel. “But when people look at me, and hear me, they see that I don’t speak with an accent. They see me as African-American, but they don’t think about where my people came from. And I am not unique. When it comes to immigration, there are 60 million people like you and me, and our voices are too important. The stakes are too high for us to not be heard.”
MORE: This Is What the Path to Citizenship Really Looks Like
As the fight over immigration reform continues, The G Project hopes to encourage black immigrants and their descendants to become part of the conversation, developing a unified message that speaks to their experiences. As McCray noted at the panel, these immigrants and their families depend on it. “Whether we consider ourselves African, Caribbean, or African-American, everyone needs to know their heritage. Everyone needs to know their roots,” she said. “After all, you cannot fulfill your future, unless you honor your past.”
[ph]