BFBF Earns A Pillar Grant

Dec. 18, 2019

 

Our team was honored to receive a grant from Buckingham Strategic Wealth's Pillar Grant Program. We were one of seven organizations, five in the St. Louis area, chosen for our work in advancing the cause of racial equity. Press release here. 

 

Representatives from each organization were given a few minutes to talk about their community effort and the way their team goes about making an impact. Here is the text of my remarks. 

-- Dick Weiss

 

Thank you Pillar People. On behalf of Before Ferguson Beyond Ferguson, our racial equity storytelling project, we are so grateful to be recognized with this grant and promise to put it to good use. We are honored to to be in such good company with the Brown School of Social Work, We Stories, Center for Creative Arts (COCA) and City Garden Montessori School. 

 

I am familiar with the work of all of these organizations. In fact, my wife and partner in this project, Sally Altman, has worked with the Brown School. I have attended trainings at City Garden. I wrote stories when I was at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the programs COCA brought to urban schools and we promote the work of We Stories at our events. 

 

I grew up just a few blocks from here at Pershing near Jackson Avenue. A street car ran in front my house (yes I am that old) and if you hopped on board it would take you from 63105 to 63106. One digit apart as far as the Post Office was concerned, but worlds apart in ways that I couldn’t then comprehend. But thanks to the work done at the Brown School, it has became totally and vividly comprehensible to all of us. According to a report from the Brown School’s For Sake of All project (now called Health Equity Works),  I grew up in a neighborhood where I could expect to live to the age of 84, while the children in 63106 would only have 67 years on this earth. These are called the social determinants of health, and the difference came down to this between us: I am white and they are black. 

 

I just turned 68 last month, so if I had been born in 63106, actuarially, I am dead. We talk a lot these days about privilege. Just being alive at my age is privilege. 

 

Well, you can’t really help it if you were born to privilege. As my faith and my family have told me it’s what you do with it that matters. So in the wake of Ferguson, and with inspiration from so many others in the racial equity movement, Sally and I started Before Ferguson Beyond Ferguson and recruited a dozen other people — including the great Sylvester Brown, who is here with us today — to help us tell the stories of St. Louis families that across generations have struggled to gain their purchase on the American Dream. 

 

We have already shared the stories of three families online, on the radio, in the newspapers and in booklets made available to schools, houses of worship, and civic organizations. After we write our stories, we stage events where we bring the families whose lives we have portrayed to bear witness to their experience. 

 

At each event, this is what we say: We did not ask you here to make you feel guilty or to ask you for money, but instead to give you a sense of possibility. We ask you to think about one thing you can do to advance the cause of racial equity. 

 

That’s when we talk about We Stories, and also the good working being done by the Urban League’s Save Our Sons program, and the Lume Institute, which educates children in a multi-culturally sensitive way.  One thing you can do is participate in their programs or refer your friends and family. One thing you can do is simply be a citizen. 

 

We didn’t invent this concept of generational storytelling. It is timeless. But I took particular inspiration from Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, and the author of a book called the Warmth of Other Suns. 

 

In that work Wilkerson chronicled the migration of African-Americans from the South to places like Chicago, New York, Detroit and Los Angeles. In doing so, she focused on several generations of individual families and in the reading you were able to identify with the moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, sisters and brothers and take them into your heart.                    

 

Not long ago Wilkerson was interviewed about her work on NPR. She described how when African-American families arrived at their destinations from the South they were shunted to the wrong side of the tracks and hemmed in by all manner of laws and public policy prescriptions. 

 

This is what happened in our town, too.                

 

Wilkerson believes changing laws and public policy is important, but insufficient. She calls for “radical empathy” ... as she states it … “to put ourselves inside the experience of others, to allow ourselves the pain, allow ourselves the heartbreak, allow ourselves the sense of hopelessness that they are experiencing...                    

 

“And so,” Wilkerson said, “I view myself as on kind of a mission to change the country, the world, one heart at a time...I feel as if the heart is the last frontier, because we have tried so many other things.”                    

 

So we join Isabel Wilkerson in her work. We offer our stories and those to come through Pillar’s generosity as a means not just of changing laws but of changing hearts.     

 

Thank you ever so much for your interest and your support.                                 

​

Dick Weiss

December 18, 2019