The main thing that we need to be doing is working as a discipline, as a profession, as a unified voice, so that we sit at the table of policymaking and are believed as not just ambulance-chasers for work for ourselves but as people with knowledge and whatever embeddedness in the community, and our design expertise within the community is absolutely essential.
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Behind-the-scenes planning is often overlooked by observers and by the media because it’s what the cameras often can’t capture. I’ve witnessed it for fifteen years at the Albert Einstein Institution. This quiet capacity-building and structural work. The planning and preparations that make movements more effective.
Black folks have consistently been denied the rights to privilege that come with citizenship that so many of us take for granted. And that’s why so many of us are no longer satisfied with the compromises and negotiations that happen behind the scenes, that continue to leave out too many people whose lives depend on the ability to participate in the decisions that impact their lives.