Voices for Virginia’s Children is proud to be a grantee of the Alliance for Early Success. The Alliance for Early Success is a national nonprofit that works with early childhood policy advocates at the state level to ensure that every child, birth through eight, has an equal opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed.   

The Alliance for Early Success replaced its annual grantee meeting with an all-new offering focused on supporting state advocacy organizations in their efforts to become allies for antiracism. The Alabama Experience brought teams from state grantee organizations—200 people in all—on a shared journey to Montgomery, Alabama, that incorporated the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites and many of the city’s other powerful spaces that explore our nation’s history of racial injustice and movement toward civil rights.  
 
Voices sent our Senior Leadership Team composed of Rachael Deane, Allison Gilbreath, and Megan Mbagwu to share in this incredible learning opportunity. This series will include each of our personal reflections. Allison Gilbreath’s reflections and learnings can be found here. Megan Mbagwu’s reflections can be found here. Below is the final installment and reflection of our CEO, Rachael Deane.   

“You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me 

I first read these words when my son was an infant. As I discovered–with a mixture of pride, terror, joy, and grief–the raw vulnerability it takes to bring a child into the world, this advice from Coates to his own son landed like a gut punch. Racism pillages wealth, segregates schools and neighborhoods, and damages bodies and minds. Becoming a parent opened my eyes to a truth I’d known in my brain but had not acknowledged in my heart: Racism also sabotages childhood. 

This is why it was so important for nearly 200 child advocates to convene in Montgomery for The Alabama Experience, a three-day, multi-racial journey that invited us to witness the threads that connect America’s original sin to today’s systems of child and youth policy. 

As I traced the paths walked by mothers forcibly separated from their children, I thought about how Virginia’s child welfare system still separates families, subjecting parents and young people to unspeakable trauma. 

As I witnessed images of children in holding cells, I reflected on the fact that Virginia still operates a 270-bed maximum security prison for children as young as age 11. 

As I gazed at the Mothers of Gynecology Monument, which honors Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the enslaved Black women subjected to medical experimentation with neither consent nor anesthesia, I thought about Virginia’s devastating racial disparities in maternal mortality. 

After my return home, my mind landed on one question: Where do we go from here?  

First, those of us in the world of child and youth advocacy must acknowledge and embrace the truth that our work is inseparable from the work of the Civil Rights Movement. Voices and our allies are part of a generations-long struggle for racial justice in Virginia and across the nation.

This struggle has always involved young people, including visionary youth who have led major breakthroughs in achieving equal rights over the decades. With this truth in mind, we advocates must examine how our current youth-serving systems continue to perpetuate racial oppression, even when it is not intentional. Racism is an adverse childhood experience. Realizing a Virginia where all young people can thrive will require us to confront racism in all forms and across all systems. 

Second, we must renew our focus on championing evidence-based policies that operate to dismantle those vestiges of racial oppression. During the racial reckoning of 2020, many advocacy organizations and philanthropic institutions made well-intentioned yet hasty shifts to respond to the national outcry to confront racial injustice. We are now experiencing a massive backlash, in the form of cuts to DEI programs, the sunsetting of racial equity task forces, shifting philanthropic priorities, and a retreat from our values. But in keeping with our acknowledgement that we’re part of a movement greater than any one of our organizations, now is the time to dig deep and double down with intention, purpose, and clarity. This may mean revisiting and recalibrating some of the strategies we’ve employed over the last five years.  

Third, we in the nonprofit sector must stop competing and start collaborating. After my return from Montgomery, I thought about what it would mean for more nonprofit and philanthropic leaders in Virginia to make the time and space to engage with a journey like The Alabama Experience. How might we transform our institutions if more leaders walked the paths of Montgomery? How might we achieve greater purpose if we stopped fighting internally—for resources, power, and the satisfaction of believing our theory of change is the only “right way” to approach advocacy—and instead made a commitment to work together, each of us playing to our strengths? Changing systems through public policy is complex, demanding work. There’s more than enough work to go around, and we are more effective when we strategize together instead of working in silos. 

Finally, the work of long-term systems change requires us to shift to a mindset of collaboration and abundance, but that mindset must be supported with real investment.  

Well-resourced individuals and institutions must invest in this work. Intention and purpose are rare commodities in the nonprofit world, where scarcity and urgency abound. The internal competition in our sector is driven directly by insufficient resources.

How might we better accomplish our missions if philanthropy invested the resources necessary for us to regroup and scale in the face of the current backlash? What if, instead of chasing the next funding opportunity, we had the time and space to be laser-focused on strategy and effectiveness? Centuries of racial injustice cannot be resolved within a grant year. Our movement needs investment in strategy, leadership, professional development, and continuity for the long term. 

As advocates for the well-being of young people, we have both the privilege and the responsibility of being part of a movement greater than any single institution.

The Alabama Experience viscerally illustrated the tragic story of racial injustice in America, yet it also uplifted stories of resilience and resistance, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides. Site visits around Montgomery drove home the complexity and ingenuity of the Civil Rights Movement, whose architects wove together lawsuits, policy advocacy, community organizing, education, and mutual aid to dismantle oppressive systems. While progress has been made, that work continues today, and we advocates have an important role to play. Ultimately, our group walked away with renewed hope and purpose.  

We’ve got a charge to keep.

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