Impacted People
Finding your start, your passion, your purpose doesn’t come easily and it doesn’t come quickly, it doesn’t come on your timeline. Ever since I left home at 19 years old I’ve pondered about things like who I am, where I come from, why I’m here and what I was meant to do. I have poured my all into the things that brought me joy, anger and pain. From being a college athlete in a sport I was never the best at, to cofounding an international human-rights organization, to fighting at the forefront of what might be the single most consequential rollback of our rights that my generation has ever seen, in the overturning of Roe v. Wade; I have fought hard to add value to a world that seems to fall apart every day. We talk about impacted people in my line of work a whole lot. Sometimes to the point where we ourselves seem so far removed from said people.
I have experienced sexual assault, eviction, homelessness, employment discrimination, lack of paid parental leave, struggles to securing adequate healthcare and more. I think I forgot to remember that I am indeed one of those impacted people we so oft speak of. That is truly why I came into this work, it wasn’t for some down the road reality, or out of the goodness of my heart just yearning to see a better place for all of humanity. It was as a survivor, a defier of odds and with hope that I decided to step out on faith and take my future into my own hands. That is the definition of an impacted person, it isn’t someone just aloof to the world drudging up enough courage to get in a line for welfare or assistance. Someone we deem lesser than as we scroll through the news and witness at the lowest point in their lives. It is someone who makes a way out of none and speaks up and speaks out for what they need and believe in. An impacted person is an advocate, those two aren’t separate and exclusive of one another. Everything from documenting maintenance and safety issues that a landlord chooses to ignore, organizing protests and attending school board meetings is an act of advocacy, for self and for the betterment of our communities and society.
When asked why I was an activist, at 21 years old, I would say “one day I will have a black husband and black sons, I want the world to be better for them! I don't want them to become a statistic",” but all the while I had a reason that wasn’t one day, it was today. It wasn’t that someday I would need a better world to live in, it was then and there and a decade earlier, even. I needed a place safe for an innocent little girl, and a world supportive of a first generation American first generation college student. I needed a place with a livable income and guaranteed housing for a struggling college student and a place that somehow saw to it that housing was a right and not a luxury. And long after I made those statements I still needed a better world for me; it’s like I thought that my children and husband alone were the ones under attack, not that they came from me, not that I mattered. I didn’t stop to think that as a working class black woman in the South I just may need a better world when I became pregnant, that healthcare and transportation wouldn’t be a given. That everything I needed would be more than earned, they would be clawed after, strived for and fought for. Looking back, I realize that I decentered myself in my activism work because that’s what we’re socialized to do. In my training I was reminded constantly to be mindful of how I “show up in a space” and to “lead from behind”. It lead to me feeling the need to shrink myself and to attempt to take any attention off myself for “the people”, for the cause. If I could talk to myself then and give any little piece of advice it would be to take ownership of my work and advocate for myself, too. No guilt or shame. It would be to speak up often, even when I feel like others might judge me for it and to fight to make sure that the voices of the most marginalized were always centered, and moved to the front, no matter what funding may have dictated in the moment. I would tell myself not to feel the pressure to follow what has been deemed the appropriate path for me by others in my “field,” and that while others may put me in a box I don’t need to put myself in one.
The term “impacted people” I think comes from the need in the nonprofit world to label and adequately assess, track, follow, the work we are doing. But there needs to be more care with the employees, volunteers, and anyone affiliated, that are also impacted persons. Just because they have been hired by an organization trying to do good work, doesn’t mean they are all of a sudden separate from the family, communities, countries and cultures they come from and the centuries of storied experiences that come with it.