“I live here in Madison and I want to see everybody doing well,” says Karen Reece, research and program evaluation director for the Justified Anger Coalition. “When we have our next livability article and Madison is number one, I want everybody to actually be able to celebrate that … instead of throwing [the article] in the garbage.”
Justified Anger has been busy developing collaborative approaches and strategies to combat the tremendous racial disparities that exist in Madison and Reece is hoping the community will come out to attend “State of Our Madison: Justified Anger General Update” that will take place Saturday, Oct. 8, 9-10:30 a.m. at Fountain of Life Covenant Church on Madison’s south side. Since May of 2015, Justified Anger has been having community conversations and piloting community-based projects. Their goal is to create a movement that will unite leadership, vision, policy, and strategy to identify the gaps in services and areas of need, and then plan and implement a long-term strategy to improve the lives of people of color in Madison.
“We’ve done quite a bit over the last year and we just want to let people in the community know what’s going on,” Reece tells Madison365. “We’ve really been working on building the infrastructure and building a concrete plan. Justified Anger started by accident, really, if you think about it. It was the [Dr. Rev. Alex Gee’s] essay written at the end of 2013 that went viral and then people were like, ‘What do we do?’”
Reece is also the director of Research and Program Evaluation at Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, a non-profit that engages the Madison area to empower African American individuals, families and communities to bring about hope, transformation and justice. “We’re here, almost 3 years later, looking at how we can make long-term, systemic change and we don’t want to do a start/stop,” she says of the Justified Anger Coalition. “We want to make sure that as it rolls out that it is a planned, solid idea that can keep going.”
Gee, pastor of Fountain of Life Covenant Church and president and CEO of the Nehemiah Community Development Corporation, is currently in China but he will be back in time for the event on Saturday. His powerful and thought-provoking essay in The Capital Times about his personal experiences with race relations in Madison kicked off the whole Justified Anger campaign to address broad racial disparities and racism in this city.
“I love the freedom we have at Justified Anger to really develop an innovative approach … having the freedom to focus on relationships and to do some of the exploring of different methods and approaches that have been tried,” Reece says. “It’s exciting to be a part of this.”
The Justified Anger initiative was organized to coordinate community-wide efforts to narrow racial disparities by taking advantage of the community-based leadership potential in the city of Madison. A group of community leaders were organized together to address the many concerns of the African-American community here in Madison.
Madison, as a whole, has some very complicated issues that the “Our Madison Plan” is working on. To start, Justifed Anger picked te Meadowood Neighborhood on Madison’s southwest side to specifically focus on. It was Rev. Gee’s hope that by focusing on one area of the city that was having trouble, Meadowood, that they could then move it to other areas that have been facing struggles in the city like Darbo-Worthington, Wexford Ridge, Allied Drive, and south Madison.
(Photo by Dorothy Krause)
Justified Anger has been working to increase engagement of African-American residents in the Meadowood neighborhood in community development and organizing activities. They are also looking to recognize and develop future African-American community leaders in the area.
Jackie Hunt, the community support specialist at Nehemiah Center For Urban Leadership Development, has been working hard in that neighborhood for Justified Anger. But trust didn’t come easy. “Jackie has experienced about every part of life that a person can experience. Now, she has a master’s degree in psychology and almost has her license in clinical psychology. We thought it would be fairly easy for her to go into the area. It wasn’t. Because she’s an outsider … she doesn’t live there,” Reece says. “Naturally, people were skeptical. There have been so many city initiatives in that area and people there are like, ‘Stop. You guys don’t know us. Stop trying to tell us what you’re going to do.’”
Justified Anger has been working to use the “collective impact approach” to develop strategies for increasing community engagement and reducing racial disparities in the Meadowood Neighborhood. Collective impact strategies allow for development of a common agenda for residents and agencies containing shared metrics, collaborative activities, through communication and backbone support. Reece says that the original plan was for Justified Anger to go in and do surveys, listening sessions, and focus groups. “Day one in that neighborhood, people said, ‘Don’t do that. We’ve been surveyed to death,’” Reece remembers. “So, we took a very organic approach. It’s really what we want to do all over Madison – not develop programs and projects necessarily but to support what is already working well and to be able to support development of things to fill in the gaps.
“That’s the state of Madison, still. We haven’t quite figured out how we can get around people being surveyed to death and disillusioned and disheartened and disengaged,” Reece adds. “And why should they? We’ve never given them a good reason. We always pull the plug on things or we white people co-opt it and take it in a different direction.
“That’s the other piece of this: Dismantling all of that stuff. And that’s something that other organizations just don’t have time to do is to take that time and build that trust and build those relationships,” she continues. “And you really can’t make progress until you do that. That’s where Justified Anger is in a really unique position because that is what we are funded to do.”
Justified Anger has made it clear from the beginning that they want to help make lasting and meaningful change.
“We can’t do that unless we do things both at the community level and the systems level,” Reece says. “If you have the systems ready but the community is not, it doesn’t do any good. If the community is ready but they can’t get anywhere – that’s what we’ve already been doing – people are over that. We have to move them both at the same time.”
Reece lists off the five focus areas of Justified Anger: Education, economic development, incarceration, family and community wellness, and leadership and capacity development.
“The first one we will launch fully is education,” she says. “The education table will be chaired by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings and it will involve experts from a lot of different organizations around education. The goal is for them to come up with initiatives that they can work on collaboratively.”
Justified Anger has financially supported programs going on in the Meadowood area. They did a pilot mentoring program at Huegel Elementary School looking at a way to engage fifth-grade boys. They hosted a Free Screening of “19: The Tony Robinson Shooting, A Case of Deadly Bias.” They’ve collaborated with Groundwork and history professors from UW-Madison and Edgewood to host an African American history course. The upcoming “State of Our Madison: Justified Anger General Update” will be a chance to look at those and many of the initiatives Justified Anger has done, but to also talk about future plans.
“It will be an interesting day,” Reece says. “We will talk about the many things that we’ve been doing, but we will also talk about our need to really think differently if we want to do this kind of thing and to really make a long-term difference. It’s going to take some time.
“This is our Madison and it really means our Madison. This is a movement that should involved every single person no matter what they look like, no matter how much money they make, how old they are, how much education that they have,” she adds. “This is our Madison and we all have to know what’s going on in our Madison to make it a better place. People should come to this event if they want to know what we’ve been up to, first of all, but then ask themselves: where do they see themselves in this plan? There truly is an open framework, and it doesn’t work unless we have all perspective representatives.”
“State of Our Madison: Justified Anger General Update” that will take place Saturday, Oct. 8, 9-10:30 a.m. at Fountain of Life Covenant Church.
