The Rev. Starsky Wilson has been paying close attention to the protests in Ferguson and their aftermath, and he saw two clear funding opportunities for the Deaconess Foundation, which he directs.
He saw the emergence of very young black leaders in their teens and early twenties, who took to the streets in anger and grief over the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. In the process, they showed great courage and leadership potential that could be nurtured to the betterment of their communities.
He also saw the emergence of leaders who are still young, but a little more seasoned, African Americans in their twenties and early thirties. They also rose in protest or in support of protestors, from the front and back line. And they also showed great courage and leadership potential that could be developed further and lead toward positive change.
Under Wilson’s leadership, Deaconess Foundation has made the first major investment in the St. Louis region motivated by specific lessons learned from the Ferguson protests, which caught the attention of the region, nation and world after Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Canfield Drive on August 9 – and the youth rose up in protest.
On August 20, Deaconess made a special allocation of $100,000 for community capacity-building, and the foundation is now in the process of disbursing those funds to community organizations and researching the most strategic allocation of funds. In fact, every thing about this allocation is strategic.
“This is meant to have a leverage effect, as far as its impact,” Wilson told The American. “We do not believe these dollars themselves, in this amount, will in any wise provide a resolution, but we do think it will make a strategic investment in capacity that can leverage other things and activities.”
Deaconess will invest in funding paid community organizer positions at the Youth Council for Positive Development and at the Organization for Black Struggle.
“I thought a lot about what got us to this moment, and without critical input from young people, we wouldn’t still be talking about this,” Wilson said. “We wouldn’t have the opportunity to explore critical matters of race and power dynamics.”
So Wilson said the foundation decided to make a strategic investment in community organizers working with youth ages 16 through 24 – “the people we saw on the front lines at night in North County,” he said. The organizers hired also will come from that demographic, Wilson said.
Deaconess also is investing in nurturing the leadership from the next age bracket, the 20- and 30-somethings. The foundation is engaging the joint venture of Emerging Wisdom and Vector Communications, he said, to work with “high-capacity African-American leaders in developing strategy and networking together.”
This funding priority reflects the fact – especially visible on Twitter, where the Ferguson movement was primarily organized – that the young leaders who emerged spontaneously had no game plan for how to work together once the initial rush of protest and violent police response subsided.
“We want to engage some power-building and power-shifting,” Wilson said. “That may seem like an odd investment. But I believe that while some of responses we’ve seen have been valuable, they could have been more valuable – if not now, then in the next situation like this – had there been a more established network with covenants for how leaders relate to one another.”
Smaller portions of the grant will go toward a neighborhood assessment of wants and needs in the Canfield area, and in a seed grant for youth development the foundations hopes will entice other, larger funders to St. Louis.
In all of these allocations, Wilson said, the foundation is looking toward the long term. As the region braces for the outcome of the grand jury process, led by St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, Wilson realizes that mid-October is not the last potential flash point, given the wide disparities in wealth and well being in this region, as documented in the landmark report “For the Sake of All” (www.forthesakeofall.org).
“We have to recognize these situations come up in our community regularly,” Wilson said, “and we need a long-term strategy to elevate people to a level of influence where they can impact policy, particularly where it concerns the care of children and youth.”
A ministry of the United Church of Christ, the Deaconess Foundation has invested more than $72 million to improve the health of the St. Louis community since 1998. For more information, visit www.deaconess.org. Connect with Deaconess on Twitter @DeaconessFound and Facebook.
Follow this reporter @chriskingstl.
