About us

The Equity Forsyth Coalition is a group of non-profit organizations, faith communities, foundations and educational institutions committed to advocating for educational equity and challenging others to join the fight for an education that celebrates and nurtures all children. By bringing national-level speakers to our community, it broadens our awareness of systemic issues of injustice.

Equity Forsyth was organized in 2019 to sponsor a talk by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter for the New York Times, where she addressed more than 1,000 attendees on racial inequality in American education and discussed her recently completed 1619 Project.

In 2024, Equity Forsyth brought Dr. Bettina Love to Winston-Salem to further illuminate the long-standing injustices within our educational system, which have deeply impacted Black children and other marginalized groups.  Dr. Love spoke to the audience of 700 people about her recent book, Punished for Dreaming:  How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal.

This year’s talk by Dr. Starsky Wilson, president and CEO of the Children’s Defense Fund, is the latest effort by Equity Forsyth to bring a national-level speaker to our community to focus on systemic inequality.

Since its inception, Partners of Equity Forsyth Coalition have included: 

• Action4Equity 

• Faith in the City and Knollwood Baptist Church

• Love Out Loud

• Union Baptist Church

• St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

• Temple Emanuel

• First Baptist on Fifth

• Love Literacy

• WS Freedom Schools

• United Way of Forsyth County

• Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools

• Wake Forest University

• Winston-Salem State University

• Salem College

• The Winston-Salem Foundation

• Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation

• Pastors for NC Children

• Women of Action