Vision and Mission Statement

The Institute's mission statement is to create and sustain an entity within a marginalized community specifically as well as the overall urban community. This will be accomplished through a comprehensive set of programs which nurture, inform, and enrich the entire urban, as well as the marginalized suburban and urban fringe communities. This is being created as a wholistic approach to informing, involving, and enriching a community as opposed to “hodge podge”, disintegrated “response to need”  efforts. 

The Institute does  inform, but also systematically seeks, understands, and amplifies the disenfranchised voices of the diaspora.  The Institute proposes ten core initiatives that will be both integrated and funded separately.  Those initiatives include the following:

1. Collaboration with other social justice and educational institutions.
2. Education (K-post doctoral).
3. Blacks and other Indigenous People’s rights.
4. Narrative Corrections in both the written and visual media.
5. Lost History Project- which reclaims the legacy of people such as Horace Peterson, Yvonne Wilson and Mary Groves-Bland.
6. Research Entity, which will seek out and fund seminal projects, which creates a more collegial process rather than allowing others to research from the outside and make sometimes ill-informed remedies.
7. Address the on-going issue of transportation parity in terms of infrastructure and funding.
8. Multi-generational Think Tank which gages strengths and weaknesses in the “community,” and subsequently recommends remedies.
9. Political and civic engagement, which will create leverage in promoting and sustaining a democratic society.
10. Podcasts and other amplification of marginalized voices.