ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2019, I joined the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee at my local YMCA. The same YMCA that my daughters have attended their whole lives for camp and before and after school programming. The Montclair, New Jersey YMCA has been a safe haven for my family during the most difficult times and that was my reasoning for wanting to join this committee. As you have read in this book, my life's work is grounded in trauma-informed practice, with an explicit lens on and integration of social justice, diversity and inclusion and I wanted to share myself and this work with and in my community. My motivation to join this committee also stemmed from the fact that social workers are community organizers. During the spring of 2020 I was asked to chair the committee along with two other members who would serve as co-chairs, a white cisgender woman named Kimberly Marsh and a cisgender Black man named Mike Chiles. Kimberly works in the corporate diversity and inclusion space. She is humble and validating of the experiences Mike and I share as people of color and members of the community. She is a mother to a young boy close in 137age to my youngest daughter Isabel. Kimberly is always working on deepening her knowledge of her whiteness, her unearned privilege and ways to sincerely show up an ally. Mike Chiles is an educator and a staple in the Montclair community having served as a leader in the public-school system for years and truly a pillar of our community. Our committee meetings often turn into a support group as we always end up sharing stories of how the COVID-19 pandemic and racial trauma has impacted us personally and professionally. It is an honor to serve beside both of them and in collaboration take a deep dive into how our Montclair, New Jersey community is also complicit in upholding the status quo, despite its reputation of diversity and inclusion. It is a very different experience for me to do this work in my own community. Similar to conversations I have had to have with my mom about our racial and cultural differences, there is an intimacy and vulnerability involved in my community organizing work that feels unique and separate from the work I do in organizations where I serve just as a consultant. In this space, I represent my family and my friends while actively working to bring an anti-racist lens to help improve the quality of peoples' lives where I live.
