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EVANSTON, Ill.-For this community, it wasnt just anyone shot by a police officer it was Jacob Blake.

Blake, who grew up in Evanston, was shot seven times in the back by Kenosha Police Officer Rusten Sheskey last Sunday.

This Sunday, in the Farmers' Market parking lot in Evanston, the community gathered to grieve what happened to one of their own.

The church where Blake attended services growing up,Ebenezer AME Church, hosted the event. A couple hundred people gathered,while wearing masks, to mark one week since the shooting.And to call for action.

What happened to Blake "disturbed many of us," said Ebenezer Pastor Deborah Y. Scott. "Enough is enough."

Scott called the group to action and to speak out against injustices.Founded in 1882, Ebenezer is the oldest Black church in Evanston.

People applaud clergy and other speakers at Ebenezer AME Church in Evanston, Illinois, where an outdoor Community Service of Lament was held for Jacob Blake, who was shot by Kenosha police a week ago.(Photo: Michael Sears, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Scott reminded the crowd of all the times Black people have asked for human dignity. The same protests signs could be used in 1968 as today, she said.

"Every human being deserves to be treated with respect," Scott said.

The speakers shared their disgust at what happened to Blake, who has remained in the hospital since the shooting. His family said he is paralyzed from the waist down.

The shooting is being investigated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.The FBI opened a civil rights investigation into the shooting.

The faith and political leaders who spoke during the event called on the crowd to take action, especially at the voting booth. They echoed messages from Blake's family for peaceful protests.

"We've got to be deliberate and intentional about our approach," said theRev.MarthaR.Holmes ofBethanyBaptist Churchof Christ."I say to my young peopleI, too, am angry. I'm outraged. I'm frustrated. But don't tear up our communities."

Stay woke and get ready to vote, is how one church elder put it.

"I get a little tired of saying the same prayers every Sunday," one pastor said.

Blake and his family's ties to the community in Evanston are strong. Ebenezer was just a block away from the parking lot gathering. Blake's grandfather, also named Jacob Blake, was a pastor there from 1967 until 1976. He fought for fair housing during the civil rights movement.Down the road, an affordable housing complex bears his name.

A woman raises her hands in praise during a vocal solo by Mathew Hunter at Ebenezer AME Church in Evanston on Sunday, where an outdoor Community Service of Lament was held for Jacob Blake, who was shot by Kenosha police a week ago.(Photo: Michael Sears, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

"I've known them my whole career here," Evanson Police Chief Demitrous Cook said of the Blake family."I've known Jacob junior since he was a little baby. It's time for a change in law enforcement. I've said this over and over."

"It's time to do better," Cook said after taking a pause.

Sisters Phoebe Bradford and Sylvia Jones, who have lived in Evanston all their lives, sat in the front row Sunday as the group condemned racism and police brutality and hoped for change. Bradford remembers Blake and the rest of his family.

For Jacob, and for all the others, I want change, Bradford said.

Sarah Hauer can be reached at shauer@journalsentinel.comor onInstagram @HauerSarahand Twitter @SarahHauer.Subscribe to her weekly newsletterBe MKEat jsonline.com/bemke.

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'It's time to do better': A call for action in Jacob Blake's hometown of Evanston, Illinois - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Mia Shah-Dand, Founder, 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics and Lighthouse3

Mia Dand is an instigator. She has created an important platform in AI Ethics that has proven crucial in the times we currently live. Her most recent event, Women in AI Ethics Annual Conference brought together important voices in the current state of diversity in ethics and AI.

Founded in 2018, 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (WAIE) list has cultivated an engaged community and has created an emergence of women in research, technology, culture, business spanning across the globe. What has emanated are the stories and lessons from their important works that have spilled into the mainstream.

Disclosure: I have known Mia for the last two years and have been involved in WAIE as a council member and I have followed her and the communities she curated in AI Ethics on Facebook and Twitter. She is unwavering, and unapologetic in her views on many of these critical issues.

I sat down with Mia Dand as she was putting this conference together. This is her story.

Q: Many people know of Mia Dand and what you've accomplished but how many people know Mia, the person? Please tell me about yourself.

Thank you, Hessie! Heres the short version of my journey from Mumbai (Bombay) to Silicon Valley. I immigrated over 20years ago from a poor neighborhood in Indias most populous city to a suburb in the United States.

In the AI Ethics circles, we rarely mention poverty or classism, or how it severely limits viable choices and opportunities for women. My parents werent highly educated, didnt have money for a computer, could barely afford to pay for my college and nor was it a priority. I was bred to breed, had an arranged marriage, and moved to the United States.

It took me a while to figure out what to do with my life. I went back to school and was grateful to get a scholarship, which made it affordable. I never dreamt that it was an option for someone like me. Heres another fun fact - I was pregnant when I started business school so I graduated with a MBA and a baby!

Q: Your company is Lighthouse3. It serves an important function for the work you do today. What motivated you to start this company?

Over the years, Ive worked for many big tech companies in a hybrid role - helping them adopt new technologies internally while also helping them market their own products externally. It was brutal with long work hours and took a heavy toll on my personal life.

There are 2 things you hear frequently in the valley, Move fast and break things and Its not like were saving babies. Six years back, my mom passed away and I started questioning that philosophy, Why arent we saving babies? What could be more important?

As some have recently come to realize during this pandemic, the corporate world is not designed for working mothers unless you have a support system of nannies and family members to help raise your children. I didnt have that luxury. I ended up leaving the corporate world and launched Lighthouse3, a strategic research and consulting firm that helps global companies with responsible innovation at scale. I love lighthouses and its the perfect metaphor for my work - someone who shines a bright light on murky issues and brings folks safely to shore.

Women in AI Ethics Annual Event 2020, Lighthouse3

Q: You started Women in AI Ethics (WAIE) a few years ago? What was your motivation?

My dad passed away in 2018. He was a special person who devoted most of his life helping others and our tiny home was open to anyone in need. I was devastated so I opened a bottle of wine and was doomscrolling when I stumbled across a Twitter thread about a list I had published earlier that year 12 Amazing Women in AI Ethics. Some folks thought my list was biased in favor of women in the U.S. Their critique spurred me to find out who else was working in this space.

The women I found were very inspiring and I kept going long after the wine was over. It became my passion project. When I reached 100, I reluctantly hit publish. Thats how the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list was born. Since then, this list has evolved into an initiative, we built a WAIE directory to recognize more women in this space, launched an AI Ethics mentoring program for women and non-binary folks and hosted events/webinars, book chats with BIPOC authors, twitter chats with experts all with one single purpose, which is to increase recognition and representation of brilliant women in this space.

In my small way, I am continuing my dads legacy of helping others and creating a space/platform for amazing women.

Q: The category of AI and Ethics is enormous and the implications across human rights, sustainability, privacy, fairness, etc. are massive. What has been your objective in covering these categories?

AI is a vast field and weve barely scratched the surface when it comes to ethical issues. Last year, we introduced an AI Ethics model with 6 dimensions:

... to reflect the wide range of ethical issues in AI including impact on society as ethically developed AI can still have unethical outcomes and be weaponized against marginalized groups.

We cannot have a meaningful discussion about the ethics of AI without including marginalized and underrepresented groups in these critical conversations.

Q: Through this journey, you've met some spectacular women along the way. Please tell me about some of them

I am incredibly grateful for the supportive women in my life, many of whom I met through the WAIE network yourself, Rediet Abebe who does so much for the community and introduced me to Dina Machuve; Timnit Gebru and Kay Firth Butterfield who are speaking at our event; Safiya Noble and Meredith Broussard who were guests on our AI Ethics Twitter Book Chat, and many other incredible women in our WAIE Collective, women who signed up to be mentors, our Advisory board, and allies. I am thankful for Rae Dand and Maya Gota who do an amazing job in running our highly successful mentoring program. Its the generosity of our community that keeps me motivated and helps us move the initiative forward.

Q: What were some of the things you've learned about AI and Ethics along the way? Was it what you had expected?

Ive learned that folks have this irrational belief that diversity and ethics in AI are two separate and unrelated issues. We need to change that. There are many talented women in the Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities who are not on Twitter but doing important work in this space. We need to look beyond social channels and include these women in our events and recruit them for leadership roles.

We cant talk about ethical AI and then exclude most of humanity from these critical conversations. I have also learned that meaningful progress on the critical issues of our time depends on people with privilege and power who are willing to take action even if they are not directly impacted by these issues.

Q: Since the time you started you've gained enormous momentum for WAIE and you've given hundreds of women much bigger platforms to connect and tell their stories, and make a difference. Was the time ripe for this?

Ive hosted emerging tech events in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade now and always used a diversity-first approach when recruiting speakers, which is why 80-90% of our speakers are either women or people of color. Its all about being intentional about including underrepresented voices.

The Black Lives Matter protests are a sign that its about time we took racial justice seriously and not dismiss it as politics. I am disappointed by some of the performative activism by well-known folks in this space. Black Instagram squares and tweets alone will not change things. Tweets are not a substitute for deeds.

Lack of representation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in AI is not a coincidence and this is not a pipeline issue. We need to be intentional about inclusion, change our definition of talent so its not biased in favor of white men, and take concrete action to promote diversity in AI.

Q: This year was a catalyst of change for you? How did it affect how you pivoted your business and WAIE?

It has been a very challenging year, personally and professionally. Ive been dealing with yet another death in my family. In addition, recently I was horrified to discover that my work in diversity was appropriated without permission to promote an all-white womens event. Whats more disturbing is that many folks in the AI Ethics community didnt see this as an issue despite their tweets and statements in support of the BLM movement.

This incident became the catalyst for revising our WAIE mission and in July 2020, we reaffirmed our commitment to diversity & ethics in AI by assuming an advocacy role as staying neutral in times of social and racial injustice is ethically and morally reprehensible.

Towards that end, we will center the experiences of marginalized and underrepresented groups in all our work and actively speak up against discriminatory and exclusionary practices.

The global pandemic, police brutality, wildfires that have scorched 1 million acres across California and displaced hundreds have taken an emotional and mental toll on all of us, which we havent fully grasped nor acknowledged. It is time to double down on our commitments to help others less fortunate and look out for each other.

Q: And now you are launching the very first WAIE conference. Please tell me about it.

I am very excited to announce our very first Women in AI Ethics annual event (WAIE 2020) on August 27th. With over 20 sessions on diversity and ethics in AI, 35+ speakers from over 15 countries, this event will bring various dimensions of diversity to life and show how they impact the ethics of AI.

For a long time, the AI Ethics narrative has been shaped by voices from male-dominated tech companies and elite institutions. Tech giants use their deep pockets to influence tech-friendly policies and research while prestigious institutions use their massive endowments, some raised from questionable sources, to control the narrative around AI Ethics while making only token gestures towards inclusion of BIPOC.

WAIE 2020 is part of my ongoing effort to create a more egalitarian space where every womans perspective on AI Ethics is welcome regardless of their background, affiliation, class, or privilege. We have built a community where women from marginalized communities are empowered to share their work and personal struggles in a supportive environment.

We want to inspire the audience to reimagine AI Ethics to include diverse voices of traditionally marginalized groups based on gender, race, ability, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, region, religion, and other.

Q. Where do you see things going in the next 5 years. Do you think Covid-19 and the events in spring will change things? What kind of impact do you hope to have?

I think 2020 may be the inflection point for AI Ethics and comeuppance for the techno-elites, including prestigious institutions who enable the racist, classist status quo.

COVID-19 has spurred much-needed conversations around the ethics and responsibility of tech companies towards their users, employees, and communities they operate in.

This is also a time when elite institutions making token PR-friendly gestures need to step up and support the marginalized communities with their massive endowments instead of posting PR statements while simultaneously slashing funding for minority and race studies.

I would urge everyone, when you see something wrong, say something. Also, take the pledge to not attend all-male and all-white panels.

Q: The most recent events in Kenosha with the shooting of Jacob Blake continues to sound an alarm about racial injustice and the continued systemic injustices that persist. What are your thoughts on this?

Systemic racism in America is enforced by the police. Its time to STOP funding guns and start investing in Black and marginalized communities. Empower them to tell their own stories and give them a seat at the table.

Sometimes we underestimate our own privilege and collective power. When it comes to racial justice, we need more deeds, not just tweets!

Unapologetic. Unwavering. Determined. Perhaps it was fortuitous and exactly the right remedy we desperately need today but Mia Dand has spearheaded a community that has become an active beacon of change and hope, and accomplishment and most importantly, perseverance in the face of mounting obstacles. Mia has given voice to women and encouraged all of us to do the same in an important era of technological advancement and upheaval.

See original here:

Mia Dands Fight For Inclusion To Save Humanity From The Dark Side Of AI - Forbes

Maria Gaspar/Photo: Nathan Keay

What does it mean to be free? Is it about being able to come and go as you please, or to feel like spaces were made with you in mind? Does it relate to your senses, being able to choose what you see, smell, taste, hear? For the better part of a decade, Maria Gaspar has explored the social constructions of space and the complicated interplay between body, place and power. Through sound art, video, installation, performance and community projectsoften related to Cook County JailGaspar asks us to interrogate our relationship to power, while at the same time inviting us to envision a more just world. Newcity speaks with the artist about working within institutions, the radical possibilities of art-making and what is needed in this national moment of crisis.

Maria Gaspar/Photo: Nathan Keay

Has the pandemic changed art-making for you? How have you been experiencing lockdown?

In a broader way, it has had me step back and think about my values and the core of my practice, but also the core of my being. As a mother to a very small child, Ive spent a lot of time thinking about how women, mothers are not supported within the institutions that I work in and with, and recognizing firsthand the inequity of that experience. Luckily, I have been able to connect with other women in arts and culture and that has been a godsend. The recent uprisings and protests, the anti-Blackness, the state violence that has been part of our culture since the beginning of colonization in the U.S., having witnessed one of the largest protests in Chicago, along with understanding the impact this pandemic, along with state violence has [had an impact on] mostly Black and brown communities, is on my mind everyday. Being an artist and a mother working in this process of abolition, it has confronted me with some really large questions about my role as an artist and as a person right now in Chicago but also beyond Chicago. Its a crisis and a profound moment that gives us an opportunity for radical change. Im looking to align myself along that trajectory. That is where I have to be.

Can you talk about the concept of spatial justicehow you define it?

My first art education, growing up on the West Side of Chicago, was spending time with muralists. They were usually local artists who were not invited by museums to exhibit, but were beloved in their community. These are the same people that were gracious enough to let me into their studios, to let me help out on a mural. They were very gracious and generous to me. I was maybe thirteen, fourteen years old. My understanding about art was grounded in this idea around do-it-yourself, around a kind of urgency, around responding to a site, a building, a wallin a way that felt relevant to the people around that space. They were often creating images unseen in media. My understanding of art is rooted in these notions of creating our own monuments or memorials, image-making that counters what popular media was telling us about ourselves. That was foundational. Almost thirty years later, that continues to be a large part of how I think about working in a particular neighborhood or city. What does it mean to work with a particular material, what kind of history does that material have, what presence does it have, what meaning does it have, how can it be changed or altered? Im constantly thinking about those things. It comes from Roberto Bedoyas writing that deals with the spatial imaginary and the ways that people on a hyperlocal level are quite ingenious in the way they re-create a space. When I talk about spatial justice, Im not only talking about a physical location, Im also talking about the kind of power a space has and the way artists can subvert, interfere, interrogate that power. Thats what those artists were doing that taught me at the very beginning. That is especially critical now as were thinking about memorials and the taking down of these racist Confederate monuments and inserting images that are representative of people that have worked toward justice. Its relevant for everybody to think about because its about how space creates a certain kind of behavior and affects the way we move through something and the way we feel. Do we feel like we belong? Or do we feel like we dont belong? To me, those are decisions that are being made by state powers. Those are very intentional. We need to look critically at what those are and tear them apart.

Maria Gaspar/Photo: Nathan Keay

Youve done a lot of work around Cook County Jail. Radioactive was your first project inside the jail. Whats the transition like from making work outside the jail to going inside and working with detainees?

Radioactive was the first time I was formally going into the jail to develop a work. That was a one-year series of workshops. Prior to that, I presented a project in New Haven, Connecticut with an organization called Artspace. That took a couple of years, to get that one off the ground. But eventually I worked with detainees inside the New Haven Correctional Center. That was, in comparison, a much smaller jail. The max they may have had was 600 people, whereas Cook County Jail, in 2012, there were around 13,000 people, and now theres half or a little less than half. Even with that decrease in population, its still significant. Ive been thinking a lot about some of the ensemble members, the participants in Radioactive go by the Radioactive Ensemble. One of the ensemble members is locked up in prison right now. We correspond through letter writing. One of the things he mentioned to me a couple weeks agoa very nice, friendly letter, just catching uphe was like, It also smelled really good. I was thinking, wow, I didnt put any scent on that letter. I didnt spray anything. To think about a stark difference between a home smell lets say, and the smell of a prison, was really profound. He appreciated that. I sent him another letter and purposefully put a scent on it. It really got me thinking about our senses: touch, taste, smell. Our connection to our senses is what makes us feel human. Im thinking about Doug and his experience and the way that scent offered him something special. Im so concerned about whats going on in prisons and jails across the country with COVID. For example, last I heard almost 2,000 people had COVID in San Quentin. Conditions have always been disparate in places like this and now we are seeing the repercussions of that in greater ways, which should be concerning for all of us because were all living on this earth and we should take care of each other.

Im interested in hearing about the process of working within the institution of the jail itself. In the Radioactive video, theres a clip where youre going over the logistics of the presentation and it seems tense. How do you navigate that?

It is not an easy process. It is very difficult. It can be very painful. When I do any kind of community-based work, I recognize quickly that the stakes are really high, which is different from making a discrete art object. Yes, maybe Im taking a risk in my studio but it is not the same kind of risk I might take when Im working with a group of people, especially a group of people that are marginalized. From the very get-go that has to be established. Then theres mistakes that happen. I have had to cut myself some slack and give myself the space to evolve as an artist doing this work. One can feel a lot of pressure in different ways. Ive had to work on keeping some perspective on that. It has to do with grounding, again, what are my values? Whats important to me?

Last night I was watching a really nice conversation with Patrisse Cullors from Black Lives Matter, one of the founders, who is a performance artist. She does lots of other art but performance art is what she came into as a young artist, and Black Lives Matter came out of that work. She really put some language to some of what Ive been feeling lately in regards to institutions, whether its Cook County Jail or another museum in Chicago or beyond, shes asking artists: what are you willing to negotiate and what are you willing to compromise? How are you being bold and courageous, especially in this moment? What are we asking institutions for? Institutions ask us for our work, for our time, they want to pick our brainshow are we holding them accountable? When I think about Cook County Jail and navigating that power structure, its not really any different than the power structures that exist in other institutions I work in. There are systems in place and one learns to move through them. Some people are more willing than others to move through them. I am willing to do it, however, Im also not willing to do it at certain times. I have had to draw some lines for the benefit of the project. If the integrity of the work is being compromised then there is really no reason to do it. That does not give it justice and thatll just be wrong. So I like the way Patrisse put those questions out into the world because I think all of us should be asking ourselves that. Especially as a Latinx artist, a first-generation person, Im the first one to go to college in my family. My mom was a teachers aide at a public school in Chicago. It was hard. So I ask myself, how do I teach within my private art school? What do I teach? How am I connecting to my students?

Im interested in this phrase I heard Fred Moten and Stefano Harney use at a Zoom talk the other day: radical complicity. Theres complicity and then theres radical complicity. The way that I see my work at the Sheriffs department or any other institution is that I have to see an opportunity for a kind of radicality. There has to be an opportunity to radicalize something in some way, criticize something, interrogate something, if that is not present then it is just complicity and I do not have to do that project. I feel evermore connected to that idea and Im working hard to better understand it and better apply it to my life and my artwork.

Maria Gaspar/Photo: Nathan Keay

What do you think art institutions or institutions like SAIC should be doing in the fight for racial justice, which many have pledged support for? Some groups, like the Teen Creative Agency at the MCA, have asked these institutions for specific actions. How can artists or educators working within institutions make an impact?

First, I want to say that artists and educators have been doing the work, not all, of course, but at least the ones I know. Chicago is fierce, between artists and artist-educators, they are some of the most radical people I know. Of course theres work to be done there, absolutely. I am waiting for these institutions to really walk the walk. The thing with TCA is amazing. These young Chicago kids, Black and brown young people, are courageous and so bold to demand of this institution racial equity, divesting from police. If contemporary museums want to join in on that movement, they need to fulfill those demands. These young people are the ones leading the way right now. They are the pulse, the heartbeat. If institutions dont respond in a way that is genuine and that is really doing the hard work that goes along with making radical change, then I dont see how these places can continue speaking this language around being contemporary or radical or dedicated to social justice. It will be totally meaningless. I really connect with those young people because I was that brown kid going from La Villita to my free art program in River North, commuting, taking two trains, probably a bus, coming home late. That was very meaningful to me, to have that independence and to feel supported, but I know that that was meaningful to that arts organization too, to have me there. Its about this mutuality. When things are totally off-balance, and one is taking more than giving, then we have a problem. I dont know the answers exactly. My hope is that people in leadership will understand what they need to do to create spaces where people feel like they belong. Especially when we look at the city of Chicago and who lives here. My mom should feel welcomed at any of these art institutions, but she doesnt.

Youve spoken about how art-making can induce liberatory acts. You focus on collective projects in communities that historically have had less arts accesshow does art fit into a larger goal of liberation or creating a more just world?

The experience of making art or seeing art has transformative power because it gets to the gut and heart of something. Maybe you cannot put words to it, but the feeling is transformative. Ive seen that in different capacities, like working with families on my block or with youth or teaching at the Art Institute or at Cook County Jail, I see how it transforms someone or a group of people. I experience it through working with others, through making installations. We are living in a moment where theres so much confinement and restriction that I think art allows for an openness, an opportunity to reimagine yourself, to reimagine a society, to rehearse. Augusto Boal says something like, theater is not the revolution but its the rehearsal for revolution. I love that quote because its so true. You can work out ideas through art-making. Or think about how that can be applied in your social life, your political life. Somebody said this to me the other day, artists are like first responders, which I love because we are bearing witness to whats happening and then were translating it to objects or experiences or music. That then allows for others to see their story in that experience and that is a way we can connect as humans. That is a way we can go beyond the capitalistic, patriarchal, homophobic society were confronted with. And thats liberation! I shouldnt say thats liberation, necessarily, its more like, that is working toward it.

See more here:

Artist of the Moment: Maria Gaspar - Newcity Art

Edited by David S. Bernstein

Illustration by Comrade / Photo via Getty Images

Keynote Address

Former Massachusetts Governor

America is a country built on aspiration, a nation reaching for the ideals expressed at its founding. Reaching, yet not grasping them in hand.

In many ways, the story of this country is a story of that reach, of trying to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a reality for all Americans.

Boston and Massachusetts have long served as a microcosm for America. That is especially true when it comes to the gap between ideals and reality, especially for Black and brown residents.

We are the birthplace of public education, yet today too many students, mostly Black and brown students, are caught in a vicious achievement gap. We are a world leader in healthcare, but racial disparities in chronic illness, infant mortality, and life expectancy are as profound here as anywhere in the world. We have been the birthplace of social progress and change, from the abolitionists to the suffrage movement to the fight for marriage equality. But to be Black or brown here today can still bring harrowing, frustrating, sometimes life-threatening discrimination.

We see these disparities in data and in the everyday experiences of Black and brown citizens of Massachusetts. I, like every other Black trial lawyer I know, have been mistaken for a defendant awaiting trial and directed elsewhere when I came to sit with other attorneys near the bench. Neither the cut of my suit nor the quality of my briefcase mattered. In fact, every Black professional I know has had similar experiences, all the while working twice as hard for half the recognition.

Racism is at the root of the wealth and income gaps between Blacks and whites. It is the cause of the disparities in health outcomes. It is why we still see persistent housing segregation, food deserts, and criminal-sentencing discrepancies. Yet we cannot ignore too that the ways we have changed our values in business have exacerbated many of the inequalities we see.

While I am a capitalist and have spent much of my career in the private sector, its clear that American capitalism is now needlessly harsh and has contributed to our feelings of constraint. The profit model for many companies is based not on innovation, but on wage suppression and job cuts. Meanwhile, residents are no longer protected by much of a safety net. Instead, their economic stability is dependent on that joblose it, and there goes a familys healthcare, housing, food, childcare, and retirement plan.

Considered commonplace for Black Americans for generations, these harsh realities economic uncertainty, social marginalization, barriers to moving upare now shared by most other Americans, and not just here in Massachusetts, but everywhere across the country.

And yet, I am hopeful. In the midst of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands, a teetering economy that casts a shadow over everyones future, and a racial reckoning long in coming, Bostonians, like Americans everywhere, are overwhelmingly responding with empathy and compassion. We are asking hard questions of ourselves and being open to hard answers.

I see young Black people taking to the streets to demand justice. I see them joined by people of every background, age, and station. They have put their collective foot down to demand for Black people the same rights that every American is taught to believe is our birthright: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I am hopeful because I see our nation is still marching toward justice. We need young activists to continue to push us and we need leaders in government and in business to listen.

It is time for bold action to reinvent our nation, and I see in Massachusetts today a new generation of leaders, activists, elected officials, and everyday citizens who are ready to help America boldly reinvent herself. They understand that while the gaps between our ideals and our reality have grown, the tools to close them lie within their reach. Right here, right now. In our commonwealth, in our lifetime.

Photo by David Becker/Getty Images

A timeline of the NAACP in Boston, where it was kinda founded.

1909

In response to news of lynchings and anti-Black riots, a group of racial justice activists, including members of William Lloyd Garrisons family, William Monroe Trotter, and former Massachusetts Attorney General Albert Pillsbury, created the Boston Committee to Advance the Cause of the Negro. It, and a similar group in New York, were the predecessors of the NAACP.

1910

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially formed, naming Boston lawyer Moorfield Storey as its first president. Storey, a white Roxbury-born Harvard Law graduate, led the groups strategy of using the 14th and 15th Amendments to challenge discriminatory laws and practices.

1911

During an NAACP conference at Bostons Park Street Church, the Boston Committee to Advance the Cause of the Negro became the very first branch of the NAACP.

1913

In its first major victory, Bostons newly minted NAACP chapter forced the YMCA to stop excluding Black boys from using its swimming pool.

1941

As a result of the Boston NAACPs investigation of colleges, Boston University announced that Black women could live in its previously all-white dormitories.

1972

The Boston NAACP filed a lawsuit against the Boston School Committee that resulted two years later in Judge Arthur Garritys desegregation order.

1975

The day after Judge Garrity put South Boston High School into receivership for failing to follow his desegregation orders, someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the Boston NAACPs branch office at the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues.

1982

The 73rd NAACP National Convention convened at the Park Plaza Hotelthe last time Boston has hosted the event. Although the city was eager to present itself as past the tensions of the busing era, the convention took place in the shadow of news that a house in a white Dorchester neighborhood had been firebombed after three Black families moved in.

1988

In a nationally watched case, the Boston NAACP won a class-action lawsuit forcing the Boston Housing Authority to desegregate its housing projects and compensate Black families affected.

2020

The NAACP selected Boston to host its national convention, with thousands expected to attend, but was later forced to cancel due to COVID-19 concerns.

Luncheon

Five Black leaders tell their truth about race in Bostonand offer thoughts on how to begin tackling the citys biggest hurdles to equality.

Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appiah

Makeeba McCrearyChief of learning and community engagement, Museum of Fine Arts

The thing that has improved since I grew up in Boston is the ability to cross lines through different cultural sectors and communities. My son can go into neighborhoods that it didnt even cross my mind I could explore. He has the freedom to operate without as many definitions of what he can and cannot do; who he can and cannot be.

Other aspects have not improved. After the murder of George Floyd, communities mobilized almost overnightwhere were all of you a month ago? Where were you last year? What is it about today that has all of you come out with signs and decide that youre going to protest the inequities of our world and our city, when Black folks have been suffering and challenged in trying to participate with equity and grace?

We have to do better. There has to be a world in which our leaders work together to create some change. We owe it to this generation of young people, and we owe it to ourselves. This is an incredibly beautiful city, with diversity and great opportunities. The key is that the work up until now has been fairly siloed. The corporate sector has worked among itself; the philanthropic sector has worked among itself; individual leaders have worked in a siloed way. If we could embrace the different gifts that the folks in this city bring to bear, then we can actually do something thats different. You know, until we had to figure out how to respond to this pandemic, I didnt talk to my colleagues at the Gardner and the ICA; now Im on phone calls with them once a week. So I hate to say that theres a blessing in something as catastrophic as COVID-19, but its given us an impetus to work together to move forward.

We have to become less patient. I do not accept that we have two years, or that we have two months. Its right now. Its not going to be easy, but I dont think that its as hard as weve made it.

Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appiah

Conan HarrisFounder and CEO, CJ Strategies

As a person who has dedicated my life to better the conditions for Black citizens in the city, state, and country, it is great to see young people from all different backgrounds at the forefront, connected and united. They are going to be the new lawyers, the new judges, the new police officers, the new mayors.

People now see the connective tissue between activism, marching, and policy. You have lawmakers like my wife, Ayanna Pressley, who is a great mixture of an activist and a policymaker. Other policymakers, you have to nudge a little bit. The best policies are driven by the people that theyre made for. Thats when you see real change.

Youre already seeing it a little bit. Months ago you would have never seen a bill pass here to change qualified immunity, to allow police to be held responsible for their actions. But we cannot get one victory and rest on our laurels. We have to keep pushing to get folks to understand that it will make your business, your company, your government better and more successful when its reflective of the citizenship that you represent.

Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appiah

Nia GraceOwner, Darryls Corner Bar & Kitchen

The city talks about the diversity here, and why its such an ideal place to host conferences and events. Then the reality is that if I want to win a contract to provide food for an event at the convention center, the answer is no. The same for small Black-owned companies who do audio-visual work, or floral work; if youre not on their list of qualified suppliers, youre not going to be a vendor. I applaud the NAACP locally, for making sure African-Americans could also be a part of that celebration, and that revenue. You cant want our dollars but not the businesses and the people that they represent. This is really about equity and access. And not just this one time, but figuring out how this can be the norm.

It needs to be more intentional, in terms of reaching out to our businesses and actually reducing the barrier to entry. Our businesses cant participate in Dine Out Boston, for instance, if theyre not a member of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. And if the cost is prohibitive, they just dont get a chance to participate in that opportunity. Were trying to come up with solutions. Thats why I and several other restaurant owners created the Boston Black Hospitality Coalition this year, because we have to get creative in taking care of ourselves and putting ourselves out there to be discovered.

Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appiah

Emmett Price IIIFounding pastor, Community of Love Christian Fellowship, Allston

In his letter from the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that he was more concerned about the white moderate, who was more devoted to order than to justice, than with the White Citizens Council. And thats what I see in Boston. Boston has a great narrative, when its self-told: that Boston is more progressive and forward-thinking than other cities. But I have lived in Los Angeles, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Bloomington, Indiana; St. Louis, Missouri; and Alexandria, Virginia. My lived experience, as a Black man who has been here since 2001, is that Boston is just as racist, if not more racist, than other cities I have lived in.

I was still in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, and I remember the angst, and the anger that I had as a young person. I think that for our young people today, it comes from seeing capital punishment of Black people on their phones, without due process, time and time again. Enough is enough.

The NAACP, whose first chartered branch was here in Boston in 1911, came out of the Niagara movement for self-determination and to reinvest in their own communities. The challenge of the millennial generation and Generation Z to the NAACP is, What have you all been doing for 110 years, for us to still be here? Do we still need the NAACP, or do we need a new mechanism, a new aspiration? Because we have made progress, but Black people continue to have to put their bodies on the line, and invite others to put their bodies on the line, so that we wont be killed. And that statement should not be said in 2020.

Photo by Emmanuel Boakye-Appiah

Sheena CollierFounder and CEO, the Collier Connection

Ive been here 16 years and a lot of people ask me why Im still in Boston. Bostons brand is exclusivity: Who do you know, who can vouch for you, are you in? That is a challenge for anyone, but it adds another layer if youre a person of color. Whats keeping me here doing this work is that Boston has a lot of potential. If we all continue to push in the same direction, we can shift things here. Its really about pushing past the current structures that are in the way. Those structures are the people, foundations, and corporations in power who might support a new initiative or give millions of dollars toward an effort, but no one is really going to give up their power. For this to really change, they need to say, Maybe I need to be replaced, maybe I need to build a successor who doesnt look like me, or wouldnt have the access that Ive had.

But I also think that Black people have to build and create our own spaces, and own our own alternative economic structures. Im calling them alternative, but its just different than the mainstream. Having ways that we instill history and education into our own children. So that while we are working in places where we are not the majority, and we may not be seen, were also doing things for ourselves in our own communities, to fortify ourselves to be seen in other spaces.

Powerpoint Presentation

From healthcare to homeownership, we still have a long way to go toward making the city a more equitable place.

Source: NAACP Boston Branch; Boston Planning & Development Agency; American Community Survey

Breakout Session

In a time of self-reflection, here are three ways Bostons government can right its own wrongs.

Photo by Phil Cardamone/Getty Images

Show Black contractors the moneyMarty Walshs administration recently boasted that nearly 5 percent of the citys $600 million-plus in contracts is going to companies owned by people of coloran increase, but still far behind other large cities, and not nearly enough to make a serious dent in Bostons wealth gap. The Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA) is calling for the city and state to commit to awarding at least 10 percent of their contract dollars to Black- and Indigenous-owned businesses.

Re-diversify the payrollIn 1974, a federal court forced Bostons police and fire departments to begin hiring one POC candidate for every white hire. Those decrees were lifted 30 years later, as judges ruled the departments were successfully integrated. But today, as the original consent-decree hires reach retirement age, the failure to maintain that integration is being exposed. The city needs to find new solutions and show real results, or risk finding itself back in court. If we discover that the city is unwilling to diversify its workforce, then we need a new consent decree, says City Councilor Lydia Edwards.

Start a housing war with the stateGentrification and other factors have priced far too many Black residents out of Boston, which means, among other things, that they are ineligible for many city jobs. Some current proposals to increase housing affordability, including updating city zoning laws, require the blessing of the state legislature, which continues to turn a blind eye. But Boston could do more on its own, says Lisa Owens, executive director of City Life/Vida Urbana, by increasing support for tenant organizations and acquiring more affordable housing. We need structural reform to make it easier for people who work in the city to live in the city, Owens says.

Workshop

The NAACP convention was supposed to foster fundamental change throughout Bostons business community. What happens now?

When the NAACP announced it was coming to town late last year, local leaders were looking forward to more than just the meetings and speeches scheduled to take place inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. They were excited about the money that promised to flow into the local economy, not to mention the opportunity to demonstrate that Boston is a welcoming place for Black visitors. Plans before, during, and after the convention included several events at the Boston Public Library; a red-carpet Basquiat Ball at the Museum of Fine Arts; a Taste of Black Boston festival on City Hall Plaza; a Duck Boat Black history tour; and gatherings on the Lawn on D.

Most important, many were excited about how the NAACP convention might have prompted the citys corporate world to commit to real change. The opportunity presented by the convention, says Pratt Wiley, president and CEO of the Partnership, which promotes the success of multicultural professionals in Boston-area business, was to focus the business community on race and equity, and to mobilize the business community around fairly specific calls to action. And mobilized they were: When Mayor Marty Walsh began dialing for dollars to finalize convention plans, local bigwigs were eager to pony up, quickly offering all of the money Walsh was looking for. The Massachusetts Competitive Partnership (MACP), for example, which includes the top executives of Fidelity, Liberty Mutual, MassMutual, Wayfair, and other area titans, pledged $3 million.

It wasnt just big checks, says Jay Ash, MACPs president and CEO. There was talk, he says, of sponsoring and hosting events, giving office space over to convention delegates, and committing to specific goalsincreasing diversity of executives and boards of directors, for example, or providing access to capital for Black and Latinx small businesses and entrepreneurs. Without a convening event, it never seems to happen, Ash says. With the [NAACP] announcement, it was a eureka moment: This is where we can have everybody in the room.

Where those good intentions go now, in the absence of the convention, remains a very open question. For a while, the momentum seemed to remain, particularly after the mass protests following the death of George Floyd. In July, for instance, more than 30 Massachusetts business associationsincluding Associated Industries of Massachusetts, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the Retailers Association of Massachusettsreleased a statement acknowledging systemic oppression and racism and committed to hold ourselves accountable.

By the time the NAACPs virtual convention began in early August, though, hopes for real change had started to fade, according to Segun Idowu, executive director of the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA). Idowu had expressed optimism a month earlier, as business leaders seemed to embrace concrete steps outlined by BECMA in a June document. But as protests petered out, and the expected spotlight of the convention disappeared, Idowu found that same group of people has suddenly become content with words like Were going to encourage or Were going to work with, he says. I have yet to see any real commitment to addressing systemic racism.

If thats soif the change some hoped the NAACP convention would bring has in fact been lostit might be a long time before Bostons Black community feels optimistic again.

Read more:

The NAACP Convention That Never Came to Town - Boston magazine

INSIGHTS FROM

WRITTEN BY

The racial and social unrest across the United States is permeating the fabric of our homes, schools, workplaces, cities and towns. For many people of color, the highly visible impacts of police brutality and lack of access to safe work and living conditions in COVID-19 are not surprising. The recent unrest has, however, opened the eyes of many white people who consider themselves allies of people of color and want change. For change to happen, the majority must first be aware and then must act.

SEGREGATION AT SCHOOL, WORK AND HOME

One of the biggest obstacles to awareness and learning for even the most well-intentioned white people is perspective. When they are asked how present segregation is in their lives, as Darden Professor Greg Fairchild does in many of his talks, most answers reflect a belief that the world is more integrated than is actually the case. While the country, our cities and towns have become more diverse, they have largely remained segregated in some cases becoming even more so. Those good intentions and conversations about diversity may lead to what Fairchild terms the illusion of inclusion; even if we do not hold bias against each other, our physical and social separation exacerbates existing income, wealth, job and achievement gaps an issue perhaps bigger than individual biases.

In a recent work,Emerging Domestic Markets: How Financial Entrepreneurs Reach Underserved Communities in the United States, Fairchild provides data and perspective that foster awareness.

Fairchild details shocking statistics shared in the report Brownat 50: Kings Dream or Plessys Nightmare? by Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee. This review of school segregation 50 years after the Supreme Courts Brown vs. Board of Education(1954) decision shows a distinct lack of progress in integrating Black and Latino students; in fact, U.S. schools were found to be increasingly segregated.

Meanwhile, in the workplace, while many companies have for years striven to build more diverse workforces, they are becoming more segregated, and less inclusive. TheAmerican Sociological Reviewpublished a paper, Documenting Desegregation: Segregation in American Workplaces by Race, Ethnicity and Sex, 19662003, that concluded: Most strikingly, black-white workplace desegregation essentially stops after 1980. there is also some disturbing evidence of resegregation after 1995 in old economy sectors.

Further, Fairchild cites a 1999 paper by leading economists David Cutler, Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto, analyzing the degree of segregation in the U.S. over the course of a century (18901990). These authors offer a conclusion about segregation over the last 100 years many would find surprising: We find evidence that the mechanism sustaining segregation has changed, they write. In the mid-20th century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude Blacks from their neighborhoods. By 1990, the legal barriers enforcing segregation had been replaced by decentralized racism, where whites pay more than Blacks to live in predominantly white areas.

Fairchild highlights the fact that residential segregation continued to characterize our neighborhoods even after the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Citing Douglas Massey and Nancy DentonsAmerican Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,he summarizes the comprehensive, disturbing case that residential segregation was not only durable across the United States, but that it continueed to play a strong role in income, wealth inequality and educational achievement gaps. Massey and Denton shared that American levels of segregation were only comparable to one nation in modern history: South Africa under apartheid. In a 2015 study, Massey and co-author Jonathan Tannen studied hypersegregation the phenomenon of a group proving highly segregated in four out of five geographic determinates of segregation in metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010. Though the number of hypsersegregated areas declined, over the course of those 40 years thedegreeof segregation barely changed. And as late as 2010, hypersegregated areas held approximately one-third of all Black metropolitan residents.

LACK OF PREJUDICE DOES NOT MEAN WEALTH OF OPPORTUNITY

Fairchilds own research quantifies the burden of growing up in residentially segregated neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. His analyses illustrate that even as adults, growing up in a segregated neighborhood tends to be associated with less success in the job market, mostly because of being cut off from the personal referral networks that drive most jobs.

Fairchild explains that for so many years, we have built our discussions and efforts under the assumption that the reduction of individual prejudice would lead to equality of opportunity. Perhaps we forgot about the physical and social space between us?

Here is where white people who consider themselves allies of people of color should take specific note: If persistently high levels of segregation are left unchecked, we should anticipate rising inequality across groupswithoutwhat we often think of as racial or ethnic prejudice. In overcoming the cycle of segregation and its effects, it is not enough to passively hope for change. Allies may consider questions about their daily lives:

INTERGROUP CONTACT

Theres an age old social science theory that provided the basis for inspiring Fairchilds interest in studying these factors: Gordon Allports Intergroup Contact Hypothesis, developed and presented in his bookThe Nature of Prejudice(1954).Allports proposition was that an ingroup members level of prejudice toward outgroup members is inversely correlated with the degree of contact that someone has with that group (i.e., white people will have lower prejudice if they have more contact with Black people of similar social status). Increased opportunities for interaction would allow individuals to test their stereotypes, and over time they would find their stereotypes hollow. Fairchild saw echoes in the arguments made around that same time (mid-1950s) by the Brown vs. Board of Education plaintiffs regarding educational segregation. Enforced and rigid barriers to intergroup relations, they argued, were demonstrably damaging to Black children. Continued segregation would sustain existing negative prejudices and stall the social progress of Black children. This contributes to what Fairchild terms inequality without bias.

So, what can we do about segregation? Studies show that in contemporary America, relatively few would suggest it is a social good. In the past, weve taken the approach that government policy should address these matters. Perhaps weve learned that those efforts are necessary and yet insufficient. How are we willing to address the space between us in our own lives? If we agree that segregation exacerbates stereotypes, creates social distance, and even diminishes the income and life expectancy of others, how can we rectify it? What personal steps can we take to integrate our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces? And yes, even our personal lives? Fairchild argues that without intentional efforts, we cannot expect these conditions to change and we should anticipate future social unrest.

Read more:

Segregation in 2020: Why Arent We Moving Forward? - Newswise

UM alumnus Shelby Grady performs on the set of Slice of Life, a short horror film written and directed by Gavin Fields and produced by Deer Run Media, a video agency founded by Fields and several fellow UM alumni. Submitted photo

OXFORD, Miss. What do an HR director at a New York City startup, a senior tax accountant for one of the worlds largest companies, and a personal assistant-cum-film producer and actor have in common?

This isnt a riddle; its a story about the diverse ways graduates of the University of Mississippi Department of Theatre and Film have parlayed degrees in theatre arts into thriving careers both in and outside the industry.

The long-touted virtues of a liberal arts education are numerous and familiar: Well-rounded generalists are primed to enter a wide variety of fields, and a liberal arts degree is a solid base for many advanced degrees, including in specialties such as law and business. But aside from the obvious, where can a theater degree lead?

Three recent alumni discovered that theater training confers advantages that can be useful in numerous careers.

Garrison Gibbons (BFA 15); HR director at Knotch

Garrison Gibbons

When Garrison Gibbons, a Huntsville, Alabama, native who grew up outside Jackson, came to the Department of Theatre and Film in 2011, he had one eye on a bachelors degree in musical theater and the other on Broadway. The youngest sibling in a large family helmed by two corporate lawyers who, he said, hated their jobs, Gibbons had been encouraged to pursue the passion for theater that hed nurtured in high school and in his community of Brandon.

What he hadnt expected was how drawn he would be to the business side of theater.

I was fascinated by the administrative side why companies were doing the things they were, how technology was informing the theater community and how marketing was changing for theater communities, Gibbons said.

Gibbons learned about operations as a student worker in the departments front office and while serving with the Ghostlight Repertory Theatre, a fledgling student theater group. After the departments production of The Laramie Project, Gibbons however unwittingly became an outspoken proponent of LGBTQ+ rights at the university, and he discovered that he had a voice offstage as well and that he enjoyed using it to help others.

I learned from that that I wanted to be a representative, to speak openly about my views and to make a difference, Gibbons said.

After graduation, he moved to New York and found a part-time operations job with an off-Broadway theater company where he did a little bit of everything from finance to marketing to donor relations. He then went to work for a fitness studio and fell in love with the companys inclusive culture.

When a trainer left to open a new studio, Gibbons was his first hire; eventually, Gibbons ended up doing human resources work, which he found that he both liked and was already prepared for.

Garrison Gibbons (center) performs in the UM Department of Theatre and Films production of The Laramie Project in September 2013. Submitted photo

Almost all of HR is picking up on cues, Gibbons said. Its a hard thing to articulate, but having studied theater, you just understand why people behave the way they do.

From there, he became very intentional about what kind of job he wanted: one that would allow him to use his voice to support and advocate for others while employing the skills hed acquired through his undergraduate degree. This led him to Knotch, a tech startup, where Gibbons was hired as head of people aka HR director. He loves this role for several reasons.

Im able to be a voice and advocate for the employees; Im able to change the culture of a company what the company looks like, how the company operates, how the company handles diversity, Gibbons said. Im literally the face of the company, which is a very cool thing to be.

Besides the ability to read people, theater training supports other aspects of Gibbons forward-facing position, which requires frequent public speaking on panels, podcasts and in-house.

Obviously, Ive never been uncomfortable presenting in front of the company, Gibbons said. I do regular all-hands meetings; Im constantly on call; Ive never felt uncomfortable pitching an idea or expressing my views. All of that is from my theater background.

Shelby Grady (BA 14); actor, producer and personal assistant

Shelby Grady

Shelby Gradys entrance to performance is a classic one: I was bitten by the bug really bad when I was 3, she said, laughing, in a recent Zoom interview. My parents always thought I would grow out of it, but I feel like its what I was put here to do.

The goal of college, for me, was to get an acting degree and act professionally.

A member of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, Grady initially pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Arts with an emphasis in acting, but after studying abroad as a sophomore and completing an internship in New York, she became eager to break into the New York scene. She switched to the B.A. track and finished a year early, graduating summa cum laude with an emphasis in acting and a minor in cinema.

Grady hit New York running and in short order checked off all the bucket-list things, landing parts in an off-off Broadway show and a slew of commercials and promo spots, plus two guest-starring roles on Discovery Network shows.

Grady played murder victims in both shows and laughed as she recalled one casting director who told her, We just really needed someone the audience would feel sorry for. I guess that was a compliment?

Its not uncommon for fledgling actors to hold jobs outside the industry while getting their stage-and-screen legs under them the timeworn cliche of the young actress who insists shes not a waitress is a timeworn cliche for a reason. Grady chose to pursue different means to her bill-paying ends and quickly found that her theater training had primed her for success beyond the bistro.

UM theatre alumnus Shelby Grady poses as a go-go girl for a commercial/online spot. Submitted photo

After starting out in customer service, she was scouted into a demanding role as an office administrator at an investment bank. But the exhaustion of juggling 60-hour workweeks with acting gigs led her to seek out something more flexible, and she landed a job as a personal assistant.

Grady pointed out that most jobs begin with some amount of training regardless, so if employers are confident that youre going to learn quickly, adapt without getting flustered and roll with the punches, youll be as good a candidate if not better than one whose degree might be a little more tailored to the position.

If youre highly adaptable, youre a fast learner and if you have really excellent interpersonal skills actors always have to have those three things then you can land so many more jobs than I ever thought possible, Grady said.

Besides working as a personal assistant, Grady is co-producing and starring in a new feature film, Brutal Season, which she is making with the video agency and filmmaking collective Deer Run Media. Deer Run was founded by Gradys fiance, Gavin Fields, also an alumnus of the Ole Miss theatre program, and three additional UM alumni two of whom also have theatre degrees.

Gradys advice to recent theater graduates entering the workforce even outside the industry is to focus on how the skills inherent to theater training can serve potential employers.

Adapting when things go wrong, rolling with the punches, and doing it with a good attitude and a smile on your face that can make all the difference in the world to employers, Grady said. Communication skills and being able to effectively discuss things with coworkers these are valuable skills that you just inherently learn when youre doing theater.

Kate Lindsay (BA Theatre Arts and Accountancy 16, MA Accountancy 17); senior tax accountant at Walton Enterprises

Kate Lindsay

I always said I wanted to run my own theater company, said Kate Lindsay from her relatively new apartment in Bentonville, Arkansas.

A tax accountant, Lindsay completed a dual degree in theatre arts and accountancy with the intention of forging a career on the business side of the theater industry.

I was really involved in theater in high school, she said. My dad was a CPA, and I always had a business mind. I did some stage management in high school, but I never really wanted to be a performer.

In fact, Lindsay acted in just one production while completing her undergraduate degrees, but she was involved in more than 20 productions between department shows and those put on by Ghostlight Repertory Theatre, which she helped found. Lindsay excelled in the role of stage manager, a backstage linchpin that supports the director, cast, crew and technicians by keeping track of and communicating logistics and details from the start of rehearsals through a shows entire run.

I had all the keys, both literally and figuratively, Lindsay joked.

After working and interning for both nonprofit and for-profit theater companies the Berkshire Theatre Festival and Davenport Theatrical Enterprises, respectively Lindsay decided that she would probably be better off supporting theater in other ways, so she returned to Oxford for a masters degree in taxation. Within weeks of beginning the program, she was already interviewing for jobs.

Kate Lindsay takes in opening night activities of the 2015 Broadway revival of Spring Awakening, produced by Ken Davenport. Lindsay spent a semester with Davenport Theatrical Enterprises, an internship that was made possible by funding from the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. Submitted photo

Lindsay accepted an offer at the Big Four accounting firm KPMG in Memphis and recently transitioned to Walton Enterprises, the business office for Americas wealthiest family.

Theater and accountancy are ostensibly disparate disciplines, and Lindsay echoed Grady in touting the usefulness of a theater education and some advantages it gave her outside of the industry.

I got 10 times more reading and analyzing and writing experience than my peers in accounting, she said. Lindsay also noted that studying accounting is akin to learning a language, and much of what you learn isnt applied until entering the job field, whereas a theater education is built on practical, hands-on experience.

I got the opportunity to collaborate in real time, Lindsay said. Especially as a stage manager, managing 20 different moving parts, hectic schedules, different personalities I loved my classes, but the stuff I did outside the classroom is a big part of what theater has done for me. It gave me a lot of opportunity.

Lindsay emphasized that the Ole Miss program was particularly valuable because of its focus on providing opportunities for undergraduates.

Undergrads do everything, she said. Its one of the reasons I was drawn to the program.

Read this article:

Choose Your Own Adventure with a Degree in Theatre Arts - Ole Miss News - Ole Miss News

Two guns were turned into police when a 17-year-old Antioch man charged in the Kenosha shootings surrendered himself, police said, but officials are not saying who owned the guns and whether they had valid firearm owners identification cards.

Kyle Rittenhouse was accompanied by his mother when he went to the police department Wednesday, Antioch Interim Police Chief Geoff Guttschow said Thursday. He faces multiple charges in Kenosha County, including first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide, in the deaths of two Wisconsin residents late Tuesday. Cellphone video shows a young white man, apparently Rittenhouse, opening fire in the street with a semi-automatic rifle in Kenosha, which has been the site of fiery protests after a police officer shot resident Jacob Blake seven times in the back Sunday.

It's unclear who turned in the guns to Antioch police. Guttschow said the guns were then given to the Kenosha Police Department and wouldn't comment further, citing the ongoing investigation. Kenosha police didn't respond to a request for comment.

A court hearing regarding Rittenhouse's extradition to Wisconsin is set for 9 a.m. Friday in Lake County.

Wisconsin attorney Tom Grieve, who is not involved in the case, said first-degree intentional homicide is a Class A felony that carries a minimum sentence of life in prison, although a judge can allow the possibility of parole at 25 years with qualifiers.

Video shows the shooter had what looks like an AR-15 rifle, said Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association. Pearson condemned the shooter's actions, pointing out there are also federal laws regarding crossing state lines with the intent to commit a crime. "We have the laws," Pearsons said. "He violated them."

Under Illinois law, it's illegal for someone under 18 to possess "any firearm of a size which may be concealed upon the person," which would seem to exclude a rifle.

I

llinois State Police would not say whether Rittenhouse or his mother have a valid FOID card, saying state statute bars the agency from disclosing that. In Illinois, minors under age 21 can apply for a FOID card as long as they have a sponsor who is a parent or legal guardian. The sponsor does not have to have a FOID card, but must be eligible for one.

There is no minimum age for minors to have a FOID card and there are no FOID-related restrictions regarding what types of guns minors can carry, state police spokeswoman Beth Hundsdorfer said.

The parent or guardian must sign an affidavit giving consent for the minor to possess firearms and ammunition, and saying, "(I) understand I shall be liable for any damages resulting from the minor applicant's use of firearms or firearm ammunition,"according to the online form.

Wisconsin, which is an open-carry state, has "really convoluted" gun possession laws for people under 18, Grieve said. That's because possession of a gun by someone under 18 is a Class A misdemeanor, but there are also statutes that, for example, allow people under age 16 to have guns for hunting with certain safety provisions, but with no specific regulations for 17- and 18-year olds, Grieve said.

Meanwhile, Illinois lawmakers and others weighed in Thursday on the Kenosha shooting.

Democrat U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood of the 14th Congressional District, which includes Antioch, called for a "complete and transparent investigation."

"That a 17-year-old from our community would have an assault weapon, travel to Kenosha, and allegedly commit grave violence toward protesters is an unspeakably horrific symptom of the toxic hate and division that permeate our country right now," she said. "This instance is painfully close to home, and it is not reflective of the values we hold dear in northern Illinois: that weapons of war, racism, and hate have no place in our communities, and we should never seek to solve problems through violence."

Underwood called for the U.S. Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bipartisan bill passed by the U.S. House that bans chokeholds, eliminates qualified immunity for law enforcement and more.

Republican candidate Jim Oberweis, who is challenging Underwood in the November election, said he was "deeply saddened by the violence" and urged leaders in Wisconsin "to get the situation under control" in Kenosha, pointing out the White House offered federal aid.

"What we are seeing in Kenosha is people who do not even live there coming into that community for the express purpose of destroying property and hurting people. Sadly, many of these agitators are coming from Illinois," Oberweis said.

Rittenhouse "should have never been in Kenosha in the first place," he said. "His recklessness has led directly to the deaths of two people."

Daily Herald staff writer Russell Lissau contributed to this story.

Continue reading here:

Guns were turned in after Kenosha shooting, but Antioch police won't say who owned them - MyWebTimes.com

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What a week. Rough for all Californians. Exhausting for the firefighters on the front lines. Heart-shattering for those who lost homes and loved ones. But a special Truman Show kind of hell for the cadre of men and women whove not just watched California burn, fire ax in hand, for the past two or three or five decades, but whove also fully understood the fire policy that created the landscape that is now up in flames.

Whats it like? Tim Ingalsbee repeated back to me, wearily, when I asked him what it was like to watch California this past week. In 1980, Ingalsbee started working as a wildland firefighter. In 1995, he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. And in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line, he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.

So whats it like? Its just well its horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome, Ingalsbee said. Every year I warn people: Disasters coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.

The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week weve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic, Ingalsbee said. Theres only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.

Yes, theres been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that good fire would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But weve had far too little good fire, as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified burn bosses (yes, thats the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, Californias agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acresan area about the size of Maineto restabilize in terms of fire.

Mike Beasley, deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park from 2001 to 2009 and retired interagency fire chief for the Inyo National Forest and the Bureau of Land Managements Bishop Field Office, was in a better mood than Ingalsbee when I reached him, but only because as a part-time Arkansan, part-time Californian and Oregonian, Beasley seems to find life more absurd. How does California look this week? He let out a throaty laugh. It looks complicated, he said. And I think you know what I mean by that.

Beasley earned what he called his red card, or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. Put the wet stuff on the red stuff, Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the states behemoth emergency response and resource protection agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet thats not the mission. They put fires out, full stop, end of story, Beasley said of Cal Fire. They like to keep it clean that way.

(Cal Fire, which admittedly is a little busy this week, did not respond to requests to comment before this story published.)

Carl SkinnerCourtesy of Carl Skinner

So its been a week. Carl Skinner, another Cassandra, who started firefighting in Lassen County in 1968 and who retired in 2014 after 42 years managing and researching fire for the U.S. Forest Service, sounded profoundly, existentially tired. Weve been talking about how this is where we were headed for decades.

Its painful, said Craig Thomas, director of the Fire Restoration Group. He, too, has been having the fire Cassandra conversation for 30 years. Hes not that hopeful, unless theres a power change. Until different people own the calculator or say how the buttons get pushed, its going to stay that way.

A six-word California fire ecology primer: The state is in the hole.

A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate thats designed to burn, and weve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire weve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.

Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until weve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.

When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, None that I know of.

How did we get here? Culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions gone awry. There are just so many reasons not to pick up the drip torch and start a prescribed burn even though its the safe, smart thing to do.

The overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created with a military mindset. Not long after, renowned American philosopher William James wrote in his essay The Moral Equivalent of War that Americans should redirect their combative impulses away from their fellow humans and onto Nature. The war-on-fire mentality found especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire. Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires. The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not the quake. Small wonder Californias fire ethos has much more in common with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines.

More quantitativelyand relatedfire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth. Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year. In 2007-08, it spent $524 million. In 2017-18, $773 million. Could this be Cal Fires first $1 billion season? Too early to tell, but dont count it out. On top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow down from the big bank in the sky, said Ingalsbee. Studies have shown that over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviationplanes and helicopters used to put out fire. A lot of the air show, as he calls it, happens not on small fires in the morning, when retardant drops from planes are most effective, but on large fires in the afternoon. But nevermind. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. How cool is that? Still only 30% of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, meaning that it stands little chance of saving a life or home. Instead the airdrop serves, at great expense, to save trees in the wilderness, where burning, not suppression, might well do more good.

This whole system is exacerbated by the fact that its not just contracts for privately owned aircraft. Much of the fire-suppression apparatusthe crews themselves, the infrastructure that supports themis contracted out to private firms. The Halliburton model from the Middle East is kind of in effect for all the infrastructure that comes into fire camps, Beasley said, referencing the Iraq war. The catering, the trucks that you can sleep in that are air-conditioned

Cal Fire pays firefighters well, very well. (And perversely well compared with the thousands of California Department of Corrections inmates who serve on fire crews, which is very much a different story.) As the California Policy Center reported in 2017, The median compensation packageincluding base pay, special pay, overtime and benefitsfor full time Cal Fire firefighters of all categories is more than $148,000 a year.

The paydays can turn incentives upside down. Every five, 10, 15 years, well see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire, said Crystal Kolden, a self-described pyrogeographer and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) And it sort of gets painted as, Well, this person is just completely nuts. And, you know, they maybe are. But the financial incentives are real. Its very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.

By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the states mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. Ive talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, whove told me, Yeah, weve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn, and then they get shut down. Maybe theres too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they dont like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.

One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what youre experiencing right now, said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke. Historical accounts of California summers describe months of smoky skies, but as a feature of the landscape, not a bug. Beasley and others argue we need to rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like. Were used to seeing a thick wall of even-aged trees, he told me, and those forests are just as much a relic of fire exclusion as our clear skies.

Courtesy of Mike Beasley

In the Southeast which burns more than twice as many acres as California each yearfire is defined as a public good. Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light. No promotion will be missed, no red flags rise. Theres always extra political risk to a fire going bad, Beasley said. So whenever anything comes up, people say, OK, thats it. Were gonna put all the fires out. For over a month this spring, the U.S. Forest Service canceled all prescribed burns in California, and training for burn bosses, because of COVID-19.

I asked Beasley why he ignited his burns anyway when he was Yosemite fire chief. Im single! Im not married! I have no kids. Probably a submarine captain is the best person for the job. Then he stopped joking. I was a risk taker to some degree. But I also was a believer in science.

On Aug. 12, 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the U.S. Forest Service chief and others signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that the state needs to burn more. The health and wellbeing of California communities and ecosystems depend on urgent and effective forest and rangeland stewardship to restore resilient and diverse ecosystems, the MOU states. The document includes a mea culpa: Californias forests naturally adapted to low-intensity fire, natures preferred management tool, but Gold Rush-era clearcutting followed by a wholesale policy of fire suppression resulted in the overly dense, ailing forests that dominate the landscape today.

Ingalsbee looks at the MOU and thinks, Thats not worth the paper its printed on. Likewise Nick Goulette, executive director of the Watershed Research and Training Center, has seen too little movement for too long to believe anything but utter calamity can get us back on track. In 2014, Goulette participated in a planning exercise known as the Quadrennial Fire Review, or QFR, that asked the grim question: What is the disaster scenario that finally causes us to alter in a meaningful way our relationship and response to fire? The answer: something along the lines of a megafire taking out San Diego. In the wake of it, Goulette and others imagined one scenario in which the U.S. Forest Service morphed into an even more militaristic firefighting agency that overwhelmingly emphasizes full suppression and is extremely risk averse. But they also envisioned a scenario that spawned a new kind of fire force, one focused on monitoring firesheds and dedicated to changing the dominant philosophy away from the war on fire to living with fire.

This exercise took place three years before the devastating 2017 Napa and Sonoma fires, and four years before the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise in 2018. Goulette thought those events would have prompted more change. The tragedies did lead to some new legislation and some more productive conversations with Cal Fire. But theres just so much ground we need to make up.

When asked how we were doing on closing the gap between what we need to burn in California and what we actually light, Goulette fell into the familiar fire Cassandra stutter. Oh gosh I dont know The QFR acknowledged there was no way prescribed burns and other kinds of forest thinning could make a dent in the risk imposed by the backlog of fuels in the next 10 or even 20 years. Were at 20,000 acres a year. We need to get to a million. Whats the reasonable path toward a million acres? Maybe we could get to 40,000 acres, in five years. But that number made Goulette stop speaking again. Forty thousand acres? Is that meaningful? That answer, obviously, is no.

The only real path toward meaningful change looks politically impossible. Goulette said we need to scrap the system and rethink what we could do with Cal Fires annual budget: Is this really the best thing we could do with several billion dollars to be more resistant to wildfire? Goulette knows this suggestion is so laughably distasteful and naive to those in power that uttering it as the director of a nonprofit like the Watershed Research and Training Center gets you kicked out of the room.

Lenya Quinn-Davidson at September Burn in Bear River.Thomas Stratton

Some fire Cassandras are more optimistic than others. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, area fire adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, remains hopeful. She knows the history. She understands that the new MOU is nonbinding. Still shes working on forming burn cooperatives and designing burner certificate programs to bring healthy fire practices back into communities. Shed like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday. Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors. Intentional fire, as she sees it, is a tool and anyone whos managing land is going to have prescribed fire in their toolbox. That is not the world weve been inhabiting in the West. Thats been the hard part in California, Quinn-Davidson said. In trying to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire, were actually fighting some really, some really deep cultural attitudes around who gets to use it and where it belongs in society.

All Cassandras believe Californias wildfires will get worse, much worse, before they get better. Right now, said Crystal Kolden, the states fuel management plan, such as it is, is for Cal Fire to try to do prescribed burns in shoulder season. But given that the fires are starting earlier in the year and lasting later (we are not even this years traditional fire season yet), the shoulder doesnt really exist. So where is the end? she asks. Its not in sight, and we dont know when it will be. The week before this past round of fires saw the hottest temperatures ever recorded in California, the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth: 130 degrees, more than half the boiling point of water, and just 10 degrees below what scientist consider to be the absolute upper limit of what the human body can endure for 10 minutes in humidity.

Meanwhile, our firefighters are completely at the breaking point, said Kolden, and theres little they can do to stop a megafire once one starts. And after a while you start to see breakdowns and interruptions in other critical pieces, like our food systems, our transportation systems. It doesnt need to be this way. We didnt need to get here. We are not suffering from a lack of knowledge. We can produce all the science in the world, and we largely understand why fires are the way they are, said Eric Knapp, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist based in Redding, California. Its just that other social political realities get in the way of doing a lot of what we need to do.

The fire and climate science before us is not comforting. It would be great to call in a 747, dump 19,200 gallons of retardant on reality and make the terrifying facts fade away. But ignoring the tinderbox that is our state and our planet invites more madness, not just for the Cassandras but for us all.

As Ingalsbee said, You wont find any climate deniers on the fire line.

Original post:

They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won't Anybody Listen? - Mother Jones

By centering on purpose, successors can find their way through the noise and scrutiny that comes with a founder becoming a household name. (Illustration by iStock/Mykyta Dolmatov)

I remember the day more than three years ago when my boss, Andrew Yang, told me he was planning to run for president. I fought back the urge to say, Of what? and merely gave him a quizzical look. I already knew he planned to leave Venture For America (VFA), the organization he founded and we built together to prepare college graduates for careers as entrepreneurs. I knew he was increasingly troubled by the effects of automation on the US workforce and that he intended to do something about it. But I wouldnt have ever dreamed that his solution would be to mount an outsider bid for the highest office in the country.

Taking the reins as successor when an ambitious founder-predecessors star continues to rise adds complexity to the already challenging period of transition, and VFA has experienced both wins and missteps as a result of Andrews momentous decision. Over the course of 2017, the VFA board, team, and I brushed up on transition best practices and followed a clear playbook. This included hiring a chief operating officer, as I had been Andrews right hand, and we needed to deepen our leadership bench to shift some responsibilities away from me. It also included developing a new strategic plan, which allowed me to put my stamp on the organization and gave me permission to roll back programs that didnt serve the new vision.

Many things are better than ever at VFA as a result of this tightly managed transition. Having a clear strategic vision improved program success rates and led to fundraising wins with aligned donors. Today, it appears we are fully on the other side of the existential threat many organizations face when the founder steps aside: the possibility that they will take their powerful connections and charismatic leadership style with them. But our playbook didnt anticipate the unique complications of having our founder step into the national limelightthree of which I describe belownor did any of us predict that Andrew Yang would become a household name in the way that he has.

There is significant debate about the merits of founders making a clean break from the organizations they start. But in our case, with a founder moving in a publicly visible direction away from the organization, complete separation was critical for a few reasons. First, nonprofits are prohibited from supporting candidates for public office. Second, organizations can become mired in challenges when a former leader takes public office and scandal ensues. Finally, there was a practical urgency to separating the organization from the platform espoused by the campaign, regardless of how my colleagues or I personally felt about it. As an organization, VFA has always been strongly apolitical, allowing it to attract supporters and fellows with a variety of political orientations. This ideological diversity is a strength we have fought hard to retain, and a clean break allowed us to do so.

Because of this, on the advice of counsel, Andrew stepped off our board, and we even went so far as to build communications firewalls between our office and his new one. This meant I was no longer in regular communication with my former boss and mentor, and had to rely on my own insights and networks to lead the organization into its next phase.

I cant tell you how many times people have said to me, This must be great for your fundraising! Well, no. While a handful of folks have learned about VFA through Andrews campaign messaging and decided to become financial supporters of our work, that isnt how most people or institutions come to make charitable contributions. Especially in light of our worlds 24-hour news cycle and the many things that compete for our attention, it takes unusual diligence for someone to move from, Wait, who is this person running for president? to I would like to make a charitable gift to the organization he once founded. Fundraising at our organization almost always stems from deep personal or organizational relationships, not mass appeals. And due to our separation, it would have been inappropriate for VFA to use Andrews donor rolls for solicitation. So, while the transition certainly didnt harm us financially, theres been no windfall to speak of (apart from people calling our office trying to get ahold of Andrew and our need to explain: Hes not here! No, I cant pass on the message!)

There has been an unprecedented influx in the form of applications to the VFA fellowship program. The number of annual applications has more than doubled over the past three years, since Andrews departure. A number of these candidates cite Andrew specifically as their inspiration. For the most part, this is great. But it has stretched our organization operationally; we rely much more on alumni application reviewers than we did in the past. And despite a larger volume of applications, weve found less stickiness among applicants. We have to search deeper to find candidates who are strongly aligned with our mission, and work harder to cultivate and retain them in an increasingly tight labor market (although COVID-19 is definitely changing this).

When your organization comes into the public eye as a result of external factors rather than an intentional public relations campaign, its easy to lose control over your own narrative. VFA has always been a little bit difficult to explain to peopleour work focuses on less-established startup hubs like Detroit, New Orleans, and Baltimore. We work with local startup leaders, professors of entrepreneurship, and different types of philanthropists and civic leaders. We want our fellows to build businesses and create jobs, but we also think about their impact much more broadly than that. We care about the entire trajectory of their careers, not just the two years they are in our program. What Andrew chose to say on the stump about VFA was totally at his discretion and almost never went into detail. But because we werent always in the drivers seat when it came to messaging, mischaracterizations of our work cropped up on Twitter, and worse, in the press.

In a free society, the press has a duty to shine a light on political leaders and aspirants. As Andrew gained visibility, scrutiny of his legacywhich hinged on founding VFAintensified. We refused to talk about Andrew or his policies, but occasionally we had to respond to press inquiries about VFAs work. One reporter told me off the record that he was impressed by how difficult it was to find people who would make negative or critical comments about VFA. And yet we also encountered criticism and innuendo we were wholly unprepared for, in particular regarding how VFA had intentionally changed how it talked about itself and its goals over the years. We were comfortable recrafting the organizations identity and its goal as part of our new strategic plan, and communicating the impact of the work we were doing accordingly. However, an old tagline Andrew used to launch the organization in 2011that VFA would help create 100,000 jobs by 2025came back to haunt us.

That tagline came before we had tested any of our ideas or recruited a single fellow. Todayafter nine years of experiencewe still care a great deal about job creation, but we now focus much more on attracting top entrepreneurial talent to markets experiencing brain drain and helping launch new ventures in these places. We have successfully demonstrated these outcomes, and they will have direct and indirect effects on job creation and economic resilience for decades to come. But because our current, directly attributable job creation numbers arent set to meet this early goal, some news outlets have portrayed VFA as a failure. The New Yorker, for example, casually wrote that Venture For America did not achieve its goals and dismissed us out of hand. And while the New York Times at least made it clear we still exist, it wrote, Venture for America, which continues to operate under different leadership, has fallen well short of its goal.

We learned that in a sound-bite culture often intent on finding scandal, nuanced, long-term thinking doesnt always rise to the top. For now, we havent publicly sought to counter this narrative for fear that pushing back might instead amplify a story thats already fading. We prefer to do the work, day in and day out, and let the efforts of our fellows speak for themselves. Our supporters and community continue to stand with us, so the measurable impact has been minimal.

VFA is using this time of physical distancing to quietly refine our work and plan for growth. This includes investing in a diversity audit and brand update, and having conversations with leaders in cities across the United States to expand the program in 2021 and beyond. All of this will continue to reshape our work beyond the founding vision. The biggest investment we are making is in a comprehensive impact study of our work. While we started with an audacious headline goal100,000 jobs created by 2025our actual impact has been different. Weve minted more than 1,200 entrepreneurial leaders, launched more than 140 companies, and impacted enterprises and communities in a multitude of ways. We need to invest in the data and case studies to understand how and where our program can be successful, as well as where it falls short so that we can change course as needed and replicate it in other contexts. This requires that we commit to truly holding up a mirror to ourselvesflaws and all.

New CEOs have a lot on their plates, and overcoming imposter syndrome is usually one of them. It took me at least a year to stop comparing myself to Andrew. Having his name appear regularly in my mainstream newsfeed didnt make it easier for me to gain the confidence I needed to lead. But now, three years later, Ive built a track record of accomplishments that include recruiting our largest and most-diverse classes in VFAs history, while making fellowship recruitment increasingly selective and focusing on developing future founders. I know that the next chapter wont be easy, but it will be built by looking forward, while honoring our founding principles.

Read more:

Leadership Transition When a Founder's Star Is on the Rise - Stanford Social Innovation Review

Steven (center, with microphone), a family member of Jesse Sarey, addresses the crowd at a rally following the bail hearing of Auburn police officer Jeff Nelson. Photo by Bunthay Cheam.

Justice for Jessehistory is made, said Steven, a family member of Jesse Sarey, speaking at a rally on Monday, August 24, 2020, in front of the Maleng Justice Center in Kent, following the bail hearing of Auburn police officer Jeff Nelson.

Nelson was charged on August 24, 2020 with second degree murder and first degree assault for the killing of Jesse Sarey. The indictment marked the first time a police officer has been charged with murder in 30 years in Washigton state and the first time since Initiative 940 was passed statewide by voters in 2018.

Nelson pled not guilty to both charges.

Sareys family and several organizers, including ForFortyTwo and Families Are The Frontline, led the rally following a bail hearing for Nelson.

A May 2019 encounter between Jesse Sarey and Officer Jeff Nelson resulted in Sarey being shot in the torso and forehead within 67 seconds of Nelson pulling up to Sunshine Grocery in Auburn. Sarey was sitting next to a freezer box when Nelson arrived.

Nelson has 77 use of force reports since 2014 and is responsible for three of the five Auburn police department shootings since 2011.

Prior to the passage of Initiative 940, the bar set to convict a police officer for murder was very high. Prosecutors had to prove malice or evil intent on the part of the officer.

Initiative 940 changed the legal standard for criminally prosecuting police officers in instances of deadly force, changing the focus to whether a similarly situated officer would believe that the use of deadly force was necessary to prevent death or serious injury to the officer or another person.

The case was investigated by the Port of Seattle Police Department as part of the Valley Investigative Team, an entity created upon the passage of Initiative 940 to investigate police use of deadly force.

In a video press conference on August 20th to announce charges against Nelson, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg walked through a video analysis of the shooting to explain how his office reached the decision to file charges.

We are not seeking bail or to detain Officer Nelson, said Satterberg during the press conference.

At the bail hearing, both the defense and prosecution asked for no bail and for Nelson to be released.

Sareys foster mother and spokesperson for the family, Elaine Simons, spoke at the bail hearing to argue for setting a bail amount.

I implore you to give us the reassurance of knowing that Jeff Nelson will be arrested and held on bail, at least $1.5 to $2 million, in keeping with the severity of the offense. That he is not above the law, said Simons during the bail hearing.

Ive been doing thisfor 17 years and have never seen this, said King County Superior Court Judge Victoria Galvn in response to the prosecutions decision to not ask for bail.

The fact of the matter is, hes charged with intentional murderThe idea that hes wearing a uniform suggests he cant be violent in any other circumstance is not an argument that sits well with this court, she said.

Bail was set at $500,000 with a no contact order protecting the Sarey family, and house arrest and electronic monitoring if bail is posted.

Katrina Johnson, an organizer for Families Are The Frontline, hopes that the charges against Nelson and Initiative 940 will continue to help build equity for communities when it comes to holding police accountable. Johnson was instrumental in organizing the creation of Initiative 940. On June 18, 2017, her cousin, Charleena Lyles, was shot and killed by the Seattle Police Department following a 911 call that Lyles had placed.

We werent [only] fighting for our loved ones, we were fighting for those people that we knew would follow us, and this law would benefit them, and Jesse Sareys family happens to be one of those families, said Johnson.

I had a conversation with [King County] Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Mark Larson. He told me before my cousins case was even finished being investigated that no police officer would be held accountable, Johnson said. Thats why I started working on Initiative 940.

Despite the charges brought against Nelson, Johnson acknowledges gaps in Initiative 940 including the need for a special independent prosecutor for police deadly use of force cases and the absence of a mechanism to hold law enforcement agencies accountable when not adhering to Initiative 940.

In June, Governor Inslee created the Task Force on Independent Investigations of Police Use of Force, which Johnson has been appointed to, to continue reforms and address these gaps.

The day after Satterberg announced the charges against Officer Jeff Nelson, a King County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Kent, Auburn, Renton and Federal Way in a lawsuit the cities brought against King County Executive Dow Constantine regarding the inquest process.

In January, the four cities filed a lawsuit that alleges King County Executive Dow Constantine stepped outside his authority when he augmented the inquest process for officer involved shootings to include an examination of a departments training and its policies and an officers disciplinary history. The City of Seattle was formerly a party to the suit but has since dropped out.

The ruling pauses several inquest processes including one for the family of Charleena Lyles.

Families of those slain by law enforcement were also in attendance at the rally to support the Sarey family and call for further police reforms.

I want to thank every person that worked on I-940. said Danielle Bargala, whose foster sister, Renee Davis, a Muckleshoot Tribe member, was shot and killed during a welfare check in 2016 by King County Sheriffs Office deputies. This victory is a victory for Renee, this victory is a victory for the Sarey familythis is change coming,

The families and organizers also hope to inform communities and galvanize more community members to come out in support.

There needs to be justice, and we feel it is necessary for this family to get the answers they need and deserve, and we would like the police officer who killed Jesse Sarey to be held accountable for his actions. We would like to set the precedent that all police officers be held accountable for their actions, said Nia Bryce of ForFortyTwo, a BIPOC youth- led group active in Kent.

This is something that is impacting our community, hes a Khmer youth that was gunned down by police. It seems hard but I hope that our [Khmer] community can begin to mobilize and be out there, said Eric Yu, who traveled from Seattle to attend Nelsons bail hearing and the rally for Jesse Sarey.

We need to keep on making noise and keep on being out in the streets, I feel like so much has progressed, rather than voting [which] feels like such a long process, being out in the streets and bringing awareness to this everyday it puts a lot of pressure and makes things go faster, Yu said.

I just ask that the community continue to be there and support this family, this is just the beginning, said Johnson, during her speech to the crowd at the rally.

All our pain and our struggle that we went through was for this family today. When one family wins, we all win.

Continue reading here:

Families and organizers hope for progress in murder charge of Auburn police officer - The International Examiner