Artwork by Perri Rhoden
Black Approaches
to Well-being
Draft Report Outline
Following a series of conversations with Black advocates and community members across the state, we conducted a statewide survey that reached across income, language, age, and gender. The June 5th statewide gathering was an essential next step in finalizing the report and, in doing so, shifting our focus toward community-driven solutions in five key areas: education, health, economic mobility, public safety, and civic engagement.
Framed to continue crafting and manifesting a statewide vision for Black well-being, we hope this endeavor will:
Strengthen Black collective organizing across the state.
Direct resources to invest strategically in Black prosperity, health, and well-being.
Inform policy change to address structural injustices and advance the well-being of Black Washingtonians.
Below is a preview of what we’re hearing from community.
CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
…is defined as individual and collective actions designed to identify and address the issues we care about. We associate civic engagement with political systems, voting, and holding leadership or elected positions within governments. These are the formal pathways in place to influence policies and laws, the rules that shape how we move about the world. And still, those pathways were never intended for our participation. Throughout history Black people, especially queer, disabled, women, have organized and inspired to shift the reality of our lived experience in this country and Washington state.
We continue to grow wiser in this moment, having learned from our ancestors (living and passed on). The collective wisdom we’ve reached continues to evolve as we learn to address tokenization, colorism, classism, ableism, and exceptionalism in ourselves and our communities. We’re moving more boldly toward creating the world we want to see. We are shifting from identifying with “the struggle” and toward identifying with the joy of our own collective vision — a long departure from what we’re told is possible.
Representation as a strategy for change.
The path to becoming a representative is money and the Black approval process.
Existing political norms are harmful and damaging.
Becoming informed with so much to know and process.
Community organizations have a critical role in civic engagement.
Civics outside of the political system.
Shift the narratives — the stories we’re told and then retell to ourselves.
Identify and heal patterns of trauma.
Integrate civics more meaningfully into the learning environment
Prioritize and fund time and space for dialogue.
Increase and enhance civic readiness.
Fund communities to plan and lead, rather than to implement funder ideas and priorities.
EDUCATION
…We have long understood that in this country and state, the education we receive is always in two parts: formal educational systems and home/community. For generations, our parents have told us that if we go to school, we’ll get a well paying job and one day, we can retire, relax, and have the things we want in life. Yet, we run into racism every step along the way, regardless of income — in preschool, in k-12, in university, and in just about every place we find employment. Today, the discussion has evolved. Black folks are realizing we need a completely different education system to realize our goals. Some of the biggest "improvements" between measurements in the 2015 report and today are in kindergarten "readiness," 8th grade math, and graduation completion rates — although the pandemic has impacted reading and math scores.
Eurocentric curriculum and approaches to teaching.
Funding structures that benefit the already resourced.
Curriculum content.
Implicit bias of teachers and administrators.
The collective work of communities and people within agencies, institutions, organizations.
Fund Black communities to plan in detail what we want from our education systems.
Support integrated, mastery or competency-based learning toward self-actualization.
Redefine academic standards to cultivate Black brilliance.
Reexamine what data we want to collect to assess growth and accountability.
Create practices of accountability and transparency at all levels of decision making.
Understand accountability and transparency work hand in hand.
Pivot from addressing trauma to cultivating love across all interactions within the education ecosystem.
Revisit job descriptions and organization structures, and diversify the workforce.
ECONOMIC MOBILITY
… is defined as our ability to access more resources over time. It is the likelihood that children can have a higher standard of living than they grew up having. Those numbers are different based on the neighborhood(s) you grew up in, your race, and your gender. Mobility, in short, is a complex web of individual, community, state, and national policies and circumstances cooked in the kitchens of racism, sexism, and classism. Wealth is measured by the collective value of our possessions. When your possessions are valued at more than you owe, you start to accumulate wealth. The laws in place today ensure that it costs a greater percentage of one’s income to be poor than it does to be wealthy. Meanwhile, the already wealthy are able to save more, invest more, and escape the fees and taxes paid by those who make less.
In the midst of this reality, we are still dreaming and conjuring different approaches to resourcing the things we want and need. We remember the joy of building social connections with each other, the care of mutual aid, of sharing what we have, and experiencing joy together. We remember service trades. Remember that we didn’t do it only out of sheer necessity, but because we recognize we are our most precious asset. Every day, we are examining the dissonance and finding our way back to our own humanity. And still economic mobility is a necessary conversation because of the present day reality of capitalism, our system of utilizing and exchanging resources.
The stories we tell or ingest about money and resources.
Our health and the cost of care.
College debt.
Access to jobs that pay well.
Employment practices.
Owning property, businesses, and investments.
How much things cost.
Shift the narratives.
Reparations.
Lean into each other as our most valuable resource.
Be intentional about what we value and create supply chains that mirror those values.
Partner with Black youth to create the jobs of tomorrow.
Hire Black people, pay them well, and put them in leadership roles.
Collect the data that helps us see and change the nature of traditional HR.
Start, invest in, and expand Black-owned businesses.
Increase Black homeownership.
Get more Black involvement in urban planning.
PUBLIC SAFETY
…as defined by Black community members within the recent Black Brilliance Research Project is, “learning how to keep each other safe without police, coercion, or the threat of systemic violence and oppression.” It looks like investing in culturally responsive, community-based care as outlined in the other sections of this report. It looks like preventing and reducing harm while focusing on healing. It centers accountability and the reality of natural consequences, not punishment and shame.
We are in conversation across our communities discussing what needs to happen in order for Black Washingtonians to feel safe and it goes far beyond policing, which we know originated from slave catchers in this country. Locally, the 1965 Freedom Patrols were a foundation for the conversation on police accountability. Today, many of us are remembering, learning, and revisiting the concept of abolition, yet our vision does not stop at addressing the overrepresentation of Black people in Washington prisons and jails (4% of population, 18% of incarcerated). Public safety does not stop at eliminating violence. It’s about exploring what justice, freedom, and safety mean in action and then creating the things we envision.
Structural violence.
Place-based investment in Black neighborhoods and the built environment.
Investment in Black people.
Community cohesion.
Physical and mental health.
Direct the money into community hands to design and run our own programs, not dictated by government strategies but supported in the ways we request.
Tailor local approaches that are nuanced and responsive.
Invest time and money in self-actualization so we understand our own power, individually and collectively.
Ensure education systems are preparing our young people for the world they live in.
Until we get rid of systems of punishment, focus resources toward incarcerated people and their families.
Shift the focus away from the symptom, rather than stopping violence — let's focus on creating safety.
Hold people, not systems accountable.
HEALTH
…Our vision of health is focused on dreaming dreams and then having the individual and collective capacity to live them out. It is something so much more than having our basic needs met. It is moving beyond treating symptoms, stopping the bleeding, and stabilizing our breathing and heart rate. It means the resources required to be physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually aligned and self-actualized are readily available to us. It looks like healthcare systems full of people with the skill and care to see and respond holistically to what ails us at the root.
Who deserves care.
Who defines care.
Healthcare as a business model.
What healthcare really costs.
Quality of available care.
Build a society that values health in action, not word.
See ableism and racism as connected.
Create community-owned, initiated, and operated care.
Address family and community, not just the individual.
Redefine what care means.
Design responsive care models.