WEPOWER

Our systems are poorly designed because Black and Latinx folks have been isolated from decision-making tables and idea-creation spaces. This harms our communities and limits our collective potential to thrive.

Our response: activate changemakers to reimagine and redesign systems that impact them.

Our inaugural cohort of Tomorrow Builders are focusing on Early Childhood Education. We believe building a better tomorrow for St. Louis starts with our kids, our future. Right now, the region’s early childhood education system is poorly designed and hurting folks most impacted by racism, prejudice, and poverty. Over the course of 2 years, the inaugural Tomorrow Builders fellows are reimagining and redesigning the early childhood education system across the St. Louis region.

There is not enough sustainable funding to create a high quality early childhood education system with well-distributed, subsidized spaces of all kinds so that every community in St. Louis thrives. Insufficient funding impacts both access to and quality of early childhood education. Adults and children alike in the St. Louis region face tremendous inequality, higher than average household poverty rates, and the detrimental effects associated with each. While education quality is notoriously hard to measure, the First Step to Equity Report still found large discrepancies in the quality of education available to white and black children. The First Step to Equity Report also found that while 8,7000 children in the region qualified for state-subsidized ECE services, only 3,9000 subsidized slots are available. With 41% of St. Louis children below the poverty line, there is a huge number of kids in need – and a huge opportunity to help them.

Fellows engaged and collected feedback from 1,000+ birth to five parents and educators to understand their dreams and the current challenges. They facilitated design process in which Fellows work with 40 community members on five solutions teams, each working to solve a critical piece of the current Early Childhood Education challenge in St. Louis. They recently released their solutions in The Playbook, and are transitioning their momentum from designing solutions to implementing them. With enough public support, we can transform these solutions from proposals to policies, ensuring that all St. Louis families have access to a high quality experience birth through five.

The Power-Building Academy program is a base-building strategy that develops residents’ advocacy and policy design skills. The goals of the program are to: (1) Develop new leaders who commit to long-term organizing to create policy and systems change (2) Support program participants as they design responsive and results-based policy solutions (3) Support program participants as they achieve issue-based policy changes that work to decrease racial disparities (4) increase voter turnout in targeted areas where turnout is low, but there could be a huge impact.

Past Power-Building Academy cohorts have formed the Rise189 campaign focused on school board transparency and strategic planning in the East St. Louis school district; the Better Budgets, Better Schools campaign, focused on budgeting transparency from the St. Louis Public Schools District; and the What’s Next, SLPS? campaign, focused on addressing the school closures process being undertaken by the St. Louis Public Schools district. Current Power-Building Academy cohorts are focusing on economic issues and early childhood education.

The Chisholm's Chair Fellowship (CCF) is a training initiative designed to support Black and Latinx women along their public leadership development journey as they explore and consider pursuing publicly elected and appointed office. Chisholm's Chair is for women that identify as champions of equity. Women that are unbought, unbossed, bold and unapologetic leaders, remaining connected to and inspired by a transformative vision for their communities, para la gente. It's for women that are ready to work hard and fight systems of oppression in the St. Louis region so that their community's most vulnerable can no longer just survive – but THRIVE. It's for women that see elected and appointed office as a lever for effecting policy change – a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Chisholm's Chair is for women that are willing to work across lines of difference, listen deeply to others, and lead with humility and love.