The people perish for lack of vision — and it’s past time we started taking control of our future.
Black Indianapolis is over 230,000 Black people. By population we could be the third largest city in Indiana following Indianapolis, Fort Wayne and outnumbering Evansville.
From unemployment rates to homeownership to educational achievement gaps, we are struggling. COVID-19 has exacerbated all of our race-based socioeconomic disparities.
For several years multiple entities including Black pastors, Black elected officials and even various community organizations have been discussing some form of Black agenda. The African American Coalition of Indianapolis formalized our efforts through a presentation to the community of our African American Coalition of Indianapolis Community Concerns and Recommendations document in October 2019.
We wanted to start a conversation, so we presented our thoughts to the community for feedback. Since our initial launch, we held over 20 gatherings ranging from in-person town hall forums to virtual town halls on social media, small group meetings, one-on-one meetings with community leaders and policy experts. We reported out our findings in videos at the African American Coalition of Indianapolis Facebook page.
We’ve met with a broad spectrum of the Black community ranging from business owners, to our elders, to grassroots activists, to policy experts, to elected officials, to community leaders, to high school students, to law school students, LGBTQ members of Black community, to hourly workers and the unemployed.
We aren’t done listening, however, active listening also involves action.
A group of Black men purchased an advertisement in this week’s paper to report to the community on our progress on the set of proposed actions we initially presented to the community roughly six months ago.
Black Onyx Management Inc. developed a survey and is providing a QR code in the advertisement or visit surveymonkey.com/r/indyblackagendas to gather perspectives on priorities moving forward and additional policy areas informed by feedback we heard from the community.
The survey takes less than 10 minutes. It is anonymous and confidential. We ask for your 2019 income at the very end in order to make sure we are reaching the socioeconomic diversity of our community. If around 1,100 Black people complete the survey, we will have statistically significant perspectives from our community — a basis for planning and moving forward.
Things to note:
Working together works — Proposed action items included actions we need to take in the community as well as actions we wanted to the city to take. To the city’s credit they have implemented a number of items we had on our agenda. We’ve also done our part, but there is more work to do.
We are building as we fly — This is our first time doing something like this as an organization. We will make mistakes. We do try to learn from errors.
Functional solidarity — This document is not the Black agenda. We believe there are multiple Black agendas in the community. We are reporting out on our work in this space.
Marshawn Wolley is a lecturer, commentator, business owner and civic entrepreneur. Contact him at marshawnwolley@gmail.com.
