La June Montgomery Tabron

"So as we've come along on this journey, we call racial equity part of our DNA. It's not a slogan for us. It's a part of who we are, and it's embedded in everything we do. Will Keith left for us that we needed to focus on racial equity, we needed to focus on community engagement, and we needed to focus on leadership."

"We measure our staff, we measure their commitment. As Ramon mentioned, we have gone on a personal learning journey. All of our staff receive significant training in this space. We've had leadership development training. That is coupled with our racial equity training, we have what we call DNA learning sessions, where on a quarterly basis, our entire staff comes together to talk about racial equity and how it shows up in our work. So our commitment to learning is deep. And as Ramon mentioned, our trustees participate in all of this training. This isn't something that we talk about as the work. It is our work."

"But in doing this work over decades, what we've learned is you can either work on the symptoms or you can look at the root causes and what we've learned as we encounter the issues of children and families. Root causes stem from racism. And if we are not going to address those racialized structures that really impact the lives of people and how they are trying to pursue better pathways that we're really just nibbling around the edges of a very systemic problem. And so we wanted to take racial equity on, dead on, to say, we got to talk about the systems that create these outcomes."