Our Voices, Part 2: Economic opportunity is often elusive for marginalized communities
Back in November, the Herald-Leader published the first round of a new community partnership that featured new voices telling stories too many of us have not heard. Those voices, Our Voices, were aimed at getting more of us to listen to stories from marginalized communities and getting more of us to think about the issues of race and social justice raised amid the extraordinary events of 2020.
The first round of the Our Voices project focused on housing, and the five writers talked about the fulcrum of grief, despair, hope and opportunity that marginalized communities often experience through housing, neighborhood, home and sense of place. We heard from people like Marie Emedi, an African immigrant who quickly realized how important the five numbers of a zip code can be for education and employment, and Sarah Williams, who has studied the effects of gentrification and community erasure in Lexington’s East End.
This time around, the community partners— CivicLex, Key Newsjournal/Key Conversations and RadioLex — put out a call for essays about economic opportunity, and once again local writers responded with poignancy and passion about the lack of such opportunity that so many people of color face. These are the stories of people who’ve aspired to the American Dream of prosperity only to be woken up by racism or other institutional roadblocks facing them. They explore the reasons behind some of our country’s more shameful economic statistics, such as a race wealth gap in which the average white family has ten times the wealth of the average Black one. They explore why so many immigrants who yearn to be entrepreneurs are so often blocked by a lack of generational wealth or social connections. These essays explore lives and perspectives many of our regular readers may not know or understand. Greater understanding is one of the goals of the project.
These writers will also be featured talking about their pieces in upcoming podcasts on RadioLex.
We’re now taking applications for the third round, which will focus on race and education. If you are interested in applying, you can download the application and make a submission civiclex.org/our-voices.
The project is funded through a grant from the Facebook Journalism Project and the Lenfest Institute. Future Our Voices Project topics will focus on the intersection of race and health and policing/justice.
We are also grateful to our partners at the Blue Grass Community Foundation, which hosts the Bluegrass Civic Journalism Fund.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 11:50 AM.
