Members of our team had a blast last week connecting with fellow Hogg Foundation for Mental Health Communities of Care initiatives during our convening and BIPOC leaders during the AESOP's Leadership Network gathering!

Our Future is US co-coordinator, Parent Lead Advocate, and Youth Engagement Lead, gathered with other CoC leaders as we enter year 6 of the grant! Together, we identified what to invest in and what to divest from, laying the groundwork for lasting change in our communities!

We also had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Garden, an intentionally youth-focused center, which truly inspires our work!

Additionally, team members attended the AESOP's Leadership Network Retreat, where we connected with other BIPOC leaders, fostering collaboration and strengthening our fundraising efforts to support the work.

Although we’re in the final year of our grant, our work will continue beyond this point, ensuring we keep making a difference in our community!

Let's look back at the time TFIU's YPAC received free copies of Alec Karakatsanis' Usual Cruelty. It is a fast, yet weighty read about the truth of crime and punishment. 

From the publisher: "Karakatsanis is interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It's perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums.

He is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He's so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional.

Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it."

Family Service Center has teamed up with NAMI Gulf Coast for a World Mental Health Day, Voices of Hope: Community Cafe! 

Thursday, October 10th from 6:00-7:30 PM at Moody Methodist Church in Galveston. 

If you love diverse books for kids and have a social media platform to share a review on, Read Your World want to give you a FREE diverse children’s or young adult book to review!

 Join us in the celebration! Read Your World (previously Multicultural Children's Book Day) will be celebrated annually on the last Thursday in January. Our mission continues to be to raise awareness of children's books that celebrate diversity by getting more books into classrooms and libraries. To achieve our goal, valued book reviewers -- like you -- play a huge part by shining the spotlight on diverse and multicultural books.

Register for a volunteer session here, Juneteenth Legacy Volunteering

Soul 2 Soul Bar & Grill is our biggest and most delicious sponsor! 

Ms. Ouida Cook and her establishment serve up scrumptious soul food and deserts including fried pork ribs, ox tails, catfish, chicken, banana pudding and more! 

Head over to her restaurant at 315 Broadway Avenue J in Galveston and support a Galveston favorite and The Future is US' Trailbazer sponsor! 

When Community Action Task Force Lead, Phylicia French, isn't doing The Future is US duties and writing (she's an author too!), she is helping and empowering others! 

Co-Coordinator Shanice is on the Woodville Public Engagement Planning Committee in Gloucester, Virginia! 

The Woodville Rosenwald School Foundation in Gloucester County, VA, is collecting oral histories from people who attended, or whose family members attended, historically African-American schools in Gloucester County from 1871, when public schools first opened, until the year schools were integrated in 1968.

The Woodville School is the only remaining one of six Rosenwald schools built in Gloucester County in the 1920s and celebrates its 100th birthday this year—2023. The Foundation plans to open this historic building as a museum and community center once renovations are complete.

During the Great Migration, African-American families in Gloucester relocated to urban centers such as Washington, DC; Baltimore; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; and New York City to seek better employment and educational opportunities. The Foundation hopes to connect with this descendant community to add their stories to the archive.

For more information, and/or to share your experience, please contact the Foundation by email at info@woodvillerosenwaldschool.org.