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Friend,
KaCey Venning spent four years in school classrooms before she realized that the best way to serve her students was by resigning.
The former public school teacher is the co-founder and executive director of Helping Empower Youth (HEY!), a youth development program based in Atlanta’s English Avenue neighborhood – an area with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the city.
Venning said that when she realized the issues her students faced at home made it difficult for some to succeed in the classroom, she couldn’t continue her career without first ensuring that their most critical needs were being met.
“I realized that the things I was most passionate about were all the challenges that my students were facing outside of school that showed up in the classroom,” Venning said. “How do we help children read at grade level, how do we get them to embrace all the things that education is meant to do if, at 14 years old, they’re fighting with whatever social ills they’re experiencing? The idea that they’re going to check all of that at the door to have a reading lesson or a math lesson – it was very hard to get past that.”
This type of community-building work, led by grassroots advocates like Venning, is a major focus of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new strategic initiative to support Black and Brown people who are working to improve the health and economic well-being of their communities.
That’s why the SPLC has announced plans to locate its new Georgia office in the English Avenue neighborhood of Atlanta’s Westside.
“We’re trying to be more intentional about centering our work in community, and that means actually being physically based in the communities that we serve,” said SPLC Chief Strategy Officer Seth Levi.
“People on the Westside represent that community. And the unique nature of the area also makes having our office here very exciting. The Westside is where the King family lived; it’s where Julian Bond – the SPLC’s first president – lived. A lot of organizing during the Civil Rights Movement took place here. There are also six historically Black colleges and universities based on the Westside, only about a mile and a half from our office. This gives us an opportunity to work in partnership with students at those colleges.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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