Real Reform Comes From Civic Stamina
The fierce national debate over structural racism in the criminal-justice system and other core American institutions isn’t new terrain for Sean Goode, the charismatic executive director of Choose 180, an organization that works with at-risk young people in Seattle.
Nor is it a novel subject for Naomi Parker at More Than Words in Boston; Audrey Henson at College to Congress in Washington, D.C.; Sloane Davidson at Hello Neighbor in Pittsburgh; or Aditi Gupta at the BLOCK Project in Seattle.
Each of them plays a leadership role in an organization that promotes greater opportunity for marginalized groups: refugees, the unhoused, and young people who are from low-income families or enmeshed in the criminal-justice, foster-care, or school-disciplinary systems. In those roles, each of them walks the tightrope between working within governmental and legal systems as they now exist and pushing for fundamental changes in how those systems operate. They spend their days trying to bridge the daunting gap between even the good intentions of individuals in positions of authority and the damaging outcomes that these systems nonetheless produce so routinely.
“We’ve got allies within every system, people who are doing everything they can to advance justice and equity, and our young people are still being failed by these systems,” says Parker, the chief advancement officer for More Than Words, which provides employment, training, and counseling for young people through a pair of used bookstores. “There is something fundamentally wrong and discriminatory about the way [these] systems perpetually fail our youth.”
The recent protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis
