January 2019

Melrose High School Girls' Empowerment Conference 2019

Panelist at Melrose High School Girls’ Empowerment Luncheon, January 29, 2019

Speeches and Presentations / By / / 1 minute of reading

On Tuesday, January 29, 2019, I visited Melrose High for a girls’ empowerment luncheon for students in the Do The Right Thing Club organized by Social Studies teacher Hannah Edsall and outgoing METCO Director Doreen Ward. The students prepared questions for our panel of four women from different fields, and then we all had lunch together. This group of young women is definitely going places, and I loved the conversations I had with many of them. We shared our hopes, fears, anxieties, and inspirations with each other and I hope I get to see them all again soon. The other panelists were Tanisha Sullivan, Esq., the President of Boston NAACP and a biotech lawyer, Summer Williams, the Co-Founder and Associate Artistic Director at Company One Theatre in Boston, and Kathryn Denman, a Senior Project Manager for the Starbucks Achievement Plan. I still keep in touch with some of the students, who have since graduated from high school.

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Slide from Structural segregation and Melrose's Built Environment presentation, showing present day zoning next to 1938 HOLC (redlining) map

Melrose’s built environment and growth patterns before and since redlining​, presented on February 7, 2018 and January 21, 2019

Speeches and Presentations / By / / , , , , , , / 1 minute of reading

On two different occasions, in I gave a presentation on structural segregation and the built environment in Melrose, Massachusetts, first for MORE: Melrose, Organizes for Real Equality in February 2018, and later, as part of an Act for Racial Justice Panel on Martin Luther King Day in January 2019. During both of these presentations, I challenged the audience to first develop a mental map/picture of Melrose and surrounding communities, and think about patterns they’ve observed, stereotypes they’ve heard about different neighborhoods, and to share their personal experiences. Then, I shared historic and present day maps to show how patterns of racial and economic segregation, visible on maps of land use policies, have persisted for over a century.

Melrose’s built environment and growth patterns before and since redlining​, presented on February 7, 2018 and January 21, 2019 Read More »

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