We’ve been through a lot in the past year. Our nation and our communities have been battered by a relentless pandemic, economic chaos, and a long overdue but painful reckoning with racial injustice – wave upon wave of crises that continue to escalate with no clear end in sight.
We recognize that our role is to provide adaptive leadership, stewarding the Partnership through an unknown landscape without predetermined answers to complex challenges. The Partnership’s values and our core backbone functions: to Cultivate Alignment, Enable Accountability, Facilitate Collective Action, and Steward Advocacy provide us with guideposts.
To that end we offer you here a synthesized amplification of your voices and the voices of other nationally recognized racial equity advocates. We hope this tapestry of sentiment shines a light on existing common ground, further deepens your communication alignment and facilitates collaborative action toward John Lewis’ Beloved Community – “a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
As we, the Partnership’s backbone support staff, continue to consider our role in helping you, the Partners, navigate this moment, we want to let you know that we, like many of you, are wrestling with how best to show up. We want to be both bold in facilitating action and yet compassionate in adapting to the fear and stress showing up in our lives.
The ongoing stress of the moment can be overwhelming and your health, safety and wellbeing are a priority. With this in mind, the violent insurrection in the Capitol still in our hearts, and growing fear surrounding the inauguration, we acknowledge that plans (ours and yours) may need to change suddenly depending on what shows up in our world on any particular day. Please stay in touch with us as events unfold so that we can move forward in concert with one another.
In solidarity – with justice, equity, integrity and compassion – Marin Promise Partnership Backbone Team
