09/16/2025
Black August - Minority-Serving Institutions, Reparations Solidarity, Housing Justice and Black Community Resilience
This year in August (named Black August for the month's significance for Black resistance and liberation figures and movements), provided several opportunities for me to share perspectives on Racial Justice, Reparations and Social Justice in Education, Housing and Community Development.
Opportunities and Themes included:
1. The UCLA Hispanic-Serving Institution Fellows Program - Story of Servingness Panel Discussion
People of color in higher education, from HBCU's to the current collection of MSI initiatives - HSI, BSI, NASI and AANAPISI - have led the way in establishing education as a platform for engaging and finding solutions to some of our society's and the world's most pressing problems
2. Northridge Indivisible - Reparations in LA and the Role of ALL Angelenos
Asked what role other groups could/ should play in securing Reparations for Black Angelenos, I pivoted to share why doing so is in every Angelenos best interest - including white Angelenos
3. LA Community Action Network - Black August Commemoration
Shared that if the incarcerated, living under our society's most inhumane conditions, could organize themselves, connect with larger movements outside their walls, and contribute provide solutions to criminalization and the restoration of humanity for the incarcerated, our houseless residents could similarly act on their own behalf as well as the larger community to address the housing insecurity and systematic displacement plaguing our communities.
4. UCLA Alumni Association - Bruin Night at the Dunbar
Not a speaker, but rather a UCLA alumni whose work in community development was nurtured as a UCLA undergrad and graduate student, I was able to show up as an example of UCLA's presence in this historically Black, now largely Latino Black/Brown community in the form of its alumni and professional stakeholders and advocates.
Each of these events allowed me to draw from my direct experience with the issues and conditions involved and to use the lens of my training in Economics and Urban Planning to understand and contextualize the events and their subject matter. Significantly, I was also able to use my experience with the Los Angeles Reparations Advisory Commission to consider what a reparative, restorative approach - informed by the intergenerational, systemic, spatially concentrated harms and inequalities experienced by Black Angelenos - could bring to previous and current efforts to address these issues and conditions in ways that generate the transformative change for which the current generation of advocates and activists are justifiably calling.
