Community Conversation Themes:

• Many communities emphasized the need for both a sense of personal and community responsibility and a focus on systems change and accountability.
  
  "Policies can be so inconsistent and can sometimes contradict one another. It puts pressure on those of us trying to serve families - not to mention the families themselves."
  
  "You take a single mother and she's working…How does she get the services she needs without agencies and service providers being more flexible in creative with things like access in community settings and hours outside of the normal 9 to 5. We don't look at people in poverty and set up services to meet their needs"
  
  "Pontiac is a city that has been forgotten. I look at the people in this room who remain committed. What we're missing is the community collaboration. We're turning the table. People are back to the table. We need to turn our community around."
  
  "It's not so much that our kids are underprivileged. I'm tired of that word underprivileged. A lot of our kids are being misdirected. It's not all about money - it's about time - it's about our time and our commitment to our kids and our grandkids. We've got to get back to some of the "old school" of community support."
  
  "As we think about all of this, one word comes to mind - FOCUS. We need to follow up and make the ask with specificity, like we need help with filling the pre-school slots that are going unfilled -- not we need help on early childhood issues. We need to get together and come up with focused objectives."
  
  "We need to embrace more information in the history of the African American community prior to slavery - and not simply focus on the time of slavery and the eventual elimination of slavery (with the white man as the hero in this scenario) that kids are never going to understand the strength of community from which they were born. African Americans should not be defined by slavery and the subsequent elimination of that slavery. They should be defined by their entire history."
  
  "When we are confronted with rude or disrespectful behavior - if we respond in the same way, then we are just as problematic as they are. We are having better outcomes because we are making the effort not to be on that punitive side. We have to get past the blaming and think about the workers – they are human too and they are overwhelmed."
  
  "We can't be afraid of the uncomfortable issues like how workers sometimes feel resentment of providing services and benefits to a population when they feel that their own people aren't benefitting. When we're willing to talk about these issues we'll get to different solutions."
  
  >> Return to main themes page.
   

• Where we go from here: Continuing the Journey.
  
   
• Return to Main Children of Color page.