Statement from Be Strong Families
This week our blog is the statement we sent to the Be Strong Families Community regarding current events. Please feel free to share.
We’ve been struggling to know what statement Be Strong Families should make in response to events of the past week. We called an impromptu meeting on Monday June 1 at 5 pm CDT for our staff and our consultants to check in with each other, to remind us of resources available to assist with processing what’s going on as part of our EAP program, and to try to co-create a Be Strong Families public statement. We were on for two hours, listening, witnessing, acknowledging, appreciating, and supporting each other. We encourage other organizations to do the same.
Some themes that came out of the meeting? Some of us are overwhelmed and grieving. Some of us did not have words — the emotions were too raw and the feelings so layered. Some shared in the chat instead of speaking for this reason. Others of us shared our personal experiences with structural racism, our different experiences with police based solely on the color of our skin, our anger, our day-to-day experiences parenting children of color, our deep sadness about the destruction of our neighborhoods: not being able to sleep because of sirens, having to show ID to enter our neighborhood, fearing for our lives and the lives of those we love. There were tears. We heard heartfelt love and respect for colleagues, the awkwardness of trying to be an ally and not knowing what to say or do, ending friendships on Facebook with people who don't get it, people living in rural areas expressing confusion about how to tell our children about what's going on in the cities. We heard appreciation for and the power of allies. We heard appreciation for us being able to gather together and have the safety to be able to be vulnerable and engage the conversation. We acknowledged that this is what we do.
As Be Strong Families, we exist at the nexus of social justice and family support. Through cafes, we create safe space for real talk, to practice respect, appreciation, and willingness to learn about each other’s perspectives and to grow together to be better people and parents. We all agreed last night that cafes are part of the answer to what’s next. Our A More Perfect Union Parent Cafes and #AMPlify social media campaign have been developed to address what we as parents were grappling with and how the organization we loved could best respond when Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012 and the list of others that came after him including Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Laquan Donald, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Tony McDade, Freddie Gray, Rekia Boyd, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Antonio Martin, Korryn Gaines, Sean Reed, Sandra Bland … Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.
The need for these conversations and the development of this initiative has been evolving and has grown to include the interrelated scourges of Islamaphobia, anti-semitism, misogyny, immigrant abuse, LGBTQ-related hate crimes. All are rooted in a concept of “otherness” that needs to be interrogated, deconstructed and ultimately eradicated in order for society to advance.
Now is not the time to rest on our laurels or trumpet our willingness to be or track record of being good allies. Be Strong Families feels that all non-profits need to examine the intrinsic and unconscious bias that is within their organizations. We all need to mind the gap between our values and our actions — assuming that there is and will be one. In order to do this, the Be Strong Families board voted to utilize the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) to assess where we are and where we need to go towards living a multicultural mindset. We are planning to engage Dr. Ramon Pastrano of Impact Lives to assist us with surfacing our unconscious biases towards examining and dissipating them.
Now is the time to feel the pain. Now is the time to heal ourselves and our families first. Now is also the time to protect our democracy as it is not lost on us that the economic and social conditions in the US today make it vulnerable to fascism.
Regarding the specifics — In the words of Rapper Killer Mike, “We don’t want to see one officer charged. We want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don’t want to see Targets burning, we want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground … It is not time to burn your own home. We have to be better than this moment. We have to be better than burning down our own homes … We must plot. We must plan. We must strategize, organize and properly mobilize” to ensure a future for our families, our country, ourselves.
Katthe P. Wolf
Founding Partner, President and CEO
Be Strong Families