Enroot Stands with Our Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities

Dear Enroot Community,

I write to you again with a heavy heart in the wake of yet another unthinkable act of racist and sexist violence. The brutal murders of 8 people, including 6 Asian-American women, in Atlanta are just the latest example of a horrific rise in acts of racist anti-Asian violence over the last year.

Racist violence perpetrated by white people toward people of Asian descent is not new in this country. It goes back at least 180 years and is visible in daily life from coast to coast. But the xenophobic rhetoric of our former President and many other public figures, especially over the last year, has led to a national crisis that is not being properly addressed. As reported in the New York Times, the group Stop AAPI Hate found that nearly 3,800 hate incidents against Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were reported nationwide over the last year. This crisis is rooted in white supremacy and has had a tremendous impact on the well-being and safety of the Asian-American community. And it is getting worse. Tuesday’s killings only exacerbate feelings of not belonging, of not being seen as equals, and of not even being safe in one’s own community.

In addition to targeting individuals of Asian descent, the killer targeted women. It’s important to note that of the 3,800 hate incidents documented last year by Stop AAPI Hate, 68% targeted women. This country, and societies all around the world, have a well documented history of treating violence against women of color less seriously than similar violence perpetrated against white women and men. Often violence against women of color, even fatal violence, is rendered nearly invisible by our collective responses in the immediate aftermath and months following such incidents. Also well documented is the way women of Asian descent are objectified and hypersexualized in this country. Our routine collective failure to respond appropriately to such situations reinforces the dehumanization of women of color and makes incidents like this more likely to reoccur. If Tuesday’s killer had not been socialized to perceive women, and especially women of Asian descent, as less human, he would not have targeted them, and would not have been capable of committing such unthinkable acts of violence. If white supremacy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity were actively challenged by most individuals in our society, instead of mostly left unchecked, acts of violence against women of color would be less common. 

Changing this pattern is all of our work. It will require everything from subtle changes in our everyday conversations and media consumption, to major structural reforms that address the systemic underpinnings of the racism and sexism manifested in these killings. It will require that each of us take an honest look in the mirror, locate ourselves in this crisis, and consider what specific changes we will make in our lives. It is especially incumbent upon white people, men, and especially white men, to devote focused effort to combating anti-Asian hate, and violence toward women of color. 

Enroot is deeply proud of, and grateful for, the incredible contributions that our students, alumni, volunteers, and board members of Asian descent have made to strengthen our community over the last few decades. We are especially proud of the students currently in our program who are of Asian descent, who courageously continue pursuing their dreams despite facing constant acts of racism, white supremacy, and violence.

Enroot stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in our own community and across the country who are of Asian descent. We remain resolved to work as a community to dismantle racism, sexism, and oppression of all forms through our daily actions at school, work and home.

In solidarity,

Ben Clark

Winter 2021 Newsletter

Dear Enroot Community, I hope you have been enjoying celebrating Black History Month and that you’re excited to catch up on some of the inspiring things happening at Enroot. It’s been a uniquely challenging period for our Enroot students and community. Each day brings new hills to climb and fresh reminders of how far we have to go, both to move beyond the COVID-19 crisis and to build an equitable society. As the vaccines give us a chance to see beyond COVID, I’ve been reflecting on the words of award-winning poet Sonya Renee Taylor:

"We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

Even as our community grapples with such persistent struggles, we also have so much to celebrate and be grateful for. Some of the exciting things in this edition of our newsletter include: reflections on celebrating Black History Month, STEM Career exploration activities with Momenta Pharmaceuticals and Fidelity Investments, laughter-filed group mentoring nights, less-fun but important FAFSA workshops, our “My Why Enroot” video series, a warm welcome back to our incredible interns Mariam and Jefferson, and even a call for brave volunteers willing to share their talents in our volunteer talent show. Thanks for continuing to support our students, from near and far, as we march together toward brighter days. I hope you share our sense of optimism about what the future holds and our pride in being part of this very special Enroot family. With gratitude,

Ben Clark Executive Director

Honoring Black History Beyond This Month

As we come to the end of Black History Month, we are left reflecting not only on all that Black people have endured throughout this country’s history, but also on all that our Black communities have contributed to the making of this country. As an organization that is committed to prioritizing racial equity and advocacy, we believe it is important to center the inequities and resilience of Black people not only during Black History Month, but throughout the year and throughout our lives.  The Enroot team honored Black History Month by using our times together as a team to share articles, podcasts, videos, and films centered around Black resilience, Black joy, Black art, Black leadership, and Black history in the making. We explored everything from the New York Times’ 1619 Project on the impact of slavery on our nation to Stacy Abrams' documentary, All In: The Fight for Democracy, on the voter suppression the Black communtiy has had to face. One of our favorites was a compilation of Trevor Noah interviews, “10 Black People Making History”. We also had the privilege of having guest speakers, Kylie Webster-Cazeau and Meggie Noel – the leaders of a student led movement to unearth the inequities Black students face at the historic Boston Latin School – speak to our team about the importance of student voice in racial equity advocacy.

Exciting Partnerships!

A Virtual STEM Panel with Momenta Pharmaceuticals

This month, we had the incredible privilege of partnering with Momenta Pharmaceuticals to present our students with an amazing virtual panel of STEM professionals. Our students heard from six professionals, all of whom are immigrants themselves, on the winding paths that have brought them to where they are now. It was particularly powerful for our students to hear from not only immigrants, but women of color in STEM, so that they could see themselves in these wonderful role models!

Following the panel, students were given the opportunity to participate in breakout sessions with these professionals and our students proceeded to ask incredibly thoughtful and insightful questions of their presenters.  We are so grateful for partnerships that have blossomed like ours with Momenta and we are so excited to see them grow further!

A Virtual Field Trip to Fidelity

In addition to our virtual field trip to Momenta, our students also had the opportunity to take a virtual field trip to Fidelity this month! Two years ago we had an in person field trip to Fidelity, where our students were given the chance to meet Fidelity employees one-on-one and learn more about what led them to their career paths. Of the nearly 50 Fidelity employees who participated that day, one of them was Sameer Ahmed – an immigrant himself. After that Fidelity field trip, Sameer was so inspired by Enroot’s work that today he is one of our wonderful Board members!

Sameer’s engagement with Enroot sewed the seeds for this month’s virtual field trip, a Financial Industry Career Workshop, where students had the opportunity to hear from Fidelity employees of many different backgrounds on how they got into finance and what different career paths exist for students like ours. After hearing from these incredible professionals, our students took part in breakout room sessions to ask their own questions and get to know the field of finance more deeply.

We are so honored to have partners like Fidelity and community members like Sameer who go above and beyond to open up a world of possibilities to our students!

Students at this year’s virtual field trip to Fidelity, getting to know Fidelity staff who are immigrants themselves, like our students.

Virtual Mentoring Going Strong

We are so happy to say that Enroot’s virtual mentoring nights have been going strong! College Success is continuing their Monthly Mentoring Nights with fun activities and virtual games like show and tell, charades, and crafting vision boards. We were also so excited to welcome back former Enroot staff member and good friend, Tamia Burkett, who shared her journey with us and demonstrated the power of storytelling. On another special night, students and mentors were challenged to twin their outfits, and one pair went the extra mile to bring their matching kittens onto the Zoom!

One student commented on how the mentoring night uplifted his spirits: “Really though! This was fun. I feel like I am revived! I was moody before this zoom call 🤦🏾‍♂️, but now I am coolin’” – Lubens

Special Feature: FAFSA Workshop While filling out the FAFSA may seem daunting, it’s definitely better with friends! With help from the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee (CEOC), we were so happy to be able to host a FAFSA drop-in event for our College Success students. At the event, students and their mentors got together in breakout rooms to work on their forms. Enroot staff was also available during the workshop, ready to answer questions and help the pairs. A special thanks to Raymond Chicoye and Tina Alu from the CEOC who gave an amazing overview presentation of the FAFSA and bounced around between breakout rooms to help clarify confusions.

“My Why Enroot” Video Series

We are so excited to share with you all our My Why Enroot campaign! My Why Enroot is a video series in which students, alumni, staff, volunteers, and board members share what makes them proud to be a part of Enroot. We hope that in hearing from our community about those who are working tirelessly to support immigrant students through the COVID crises, the anti-immigrant sentiment of our country today, and the ups and downs of being a teenager new to this country – you’ll know why immigrant youth appreciate Enroot now more than ever!  Click here to hear from our incredible students, alumni, staff, volunteers, and board members.

Welcoming Back Mariam and Jefferson!

We are welcoming back two incredible interns to our Enroot team – Mariam AlAdsani and Jefferson Xu. Read more about Mariam and Jefferson and why we are so excited to have them on our team!

Things To Look Forward To

Enroot Talent Show Coming This Spring! Our Volunteer Committee is currently in the middle of planning our next spring event, Enroot’s Got Talent. We are currently in the process of signing up participants! If you are a current volunteer and have a talent you want to showcase, reach out to organizers, Ava and Nathalie to sign up. We hope that this night is full of fun! There will be prizes for the top 3 best talents!

Upcoming Unconscious Bias Trainings There are more Unconscious Bias trainings coming up for our current volunteers. We are in the process of designing two trainings on our Unconscious Bias series, which will deepen volunteer’s understanding of a trauma informed approach to supporting students. As we continuously think about the effects of institutional, interpersonal, ideological, and internalized racism in BIPOC/immigrant communities, we seek to provide a backbone and tools on how to approach safe and productive conversations with Enroot students.

Give Back To Our Immigrant Community!

As we come up on almost a full year of the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S., we must acknowledge that our immigrant youth have been enduring housing vulnerability, food insecurity, health inequities, and barriers to education – throughout this year and far before. We ask you to please consider donating to Enroot to help us better support our students with one on one mentoring and social-emotional support through these incredibly hard times. Thank you for your continued support of our students and of immigrant communities everywhere!

DONATE TODAY!

A Letter from the Enroot Team on Why We Celebrate Black History Month

Dear Enroot Family,

We, the Enroot staff team, invite you to join us in observing and honoring Black History Month alongside our students, alumni, volunteers, Board members, and our entire community. The last year has been a reminder of the continued struggles of Black people in this country and our resilience to continue to fight. We have seen the power of the Black Lives Matter movement spark global solidarity and the push towards greater visibility about the ongoing issues affecting the Black community. At the forefront, we celebrate Black History Month by uplifting the monumental contributions of Black people in building and improving our communities, improving this country, and countries around the world. In February, and throughout the year:

We celebrate Black joy, Black beauty, and Black art.

We celebrate Black courage, Black leadership, Black strength, and Black wisdom.

We celebrate Black brilliance, Black ingenuity, Black intellect, and Black invention.

We honor the fact that Black people are integral to the foundation of our country – from its inception, in defense of our values of freedom, liberty and democracy, and the continued commitment to holding us accountable to those values each day – without the appropriate recognition and compensation.

We celebrate that Black people have been at the forefront of resistance in this country, as Nikole Hannah-Jones captures so well in the seminal 1619 Project:

We celebrate the many Enroot students, alumni, families, volunteers, staff and Board members who identify as Black and their contributions to building the organization that we all appreciate so much today.

Alongside our students, we celebrate the contributions of Black people to so many of the countries our students hail from, from Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti and Haile Sellasie in Ethiopia, to lesser known figures like Carmen Pereira in Guinea-Bissau.

We celebrate the essential contributions of Black immigrants in science, technology, medicine, the arts, education, and across all fields.

We reaffirm each day in our words and actions that BLACK LIVES MATTER, and are sacred.

Most importantly, we hold ourselves accountable, through our work and in our personal lives, for taking concrete anti-racist action daily to advance racial equity in our community and beyond.

Thank you for joining us in celebrating Black History Month, and in celebrating Black people all 12 months of the year.

In celebration and in solidarity,

The Enroot Team

We Need to Embrace Radical Honesty to Advance Racial Equity

Originally authored by Ben Clark, Executive Director of Enroot, and published in the Cambridge Chronicle on January 21, 2021.

Like so many in our country and around the world, my family and I found the events of Inauguration Day 2021 profoundly uplifting, relieving, inspiring and hopeful. It is clear President Biden and Vice President Harris are working hard to steer us back in the right direction -- but they are counting on each of us to provide the momentum to actually move forward.

One of the things they most need from us now is radical honesty.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 white supremacist insurrection, many leaders used the refrain we’ve heard so many times over the last 4 years, “This is not who we are.” I’m sure I too have used those words to try to distance myself from things I found to be in violation of the stated values of this country. But the truth is, almost every time we are tempted to declare this is "not who we are," an honest look in the mirror reveals that the situation actually does reflect who we are, and who we have always been. We need to be willing to move beyond “this is not who we are” and instead declare, “This is not who we aspire to become.” We need to embrace radical honesty.

Even a very cursory, but honest, look at the history of this country reveals that white men seeking to gain advantage by violently oppressing the voices and lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color is actually one of our most constant and defining narratives. It is of course among the ugliest, most tragic, and most shameful aspects of our society. But it is nonetheless an unmistakable and central feature, from the moment white newcomers stole land from Native Americans and imported enslaved Africans to work it. 

If we are being honest, who we are is a country that began based on the premise that white people, and specifically landowning white men, were superior, and uniquely deserving of freedom and democratic governance. This premise is white supremacy. It is a fallacy. It is a lie. 

Who we are is a country that continues to be primarily led by white men, and that has actively resisted including those who are not white men from full participation in society at nearly every turn.

Who we are is a country where this myth of the superiority of white people is so deeply encoded into how we operate that sometimes we don’t recognize it as a threat even when it’s staring us in the face, such as when we failed to ward off a well-publicized violent insurrection planned and led by self-professed white supremacists.

We are of course so much more than this and we have much to be proud of. With a few important exceptions, we are a country that has largely stewarded peaceful transfers of power. We are a country where generations and generations of immigrants have sought refuge from tyranny, war and deadly political violence. We are the country that prevented Nazi Germany from conquering Europe. We are a country that has made major global contributions to science, technology, music, and culture. We are the country who just elected our first vice president who identifies as a woman, a proud Black woman, a proud South Asian woman, and a proud child of immigrants. It is important to celebrate the things we’ve gotten right and that make this country great.

But to confuse who we are with who we profess to be in our founding documents is to confuse the present with the future. It’s to disregard, diminish and erase the experiences of millions of people in this country who have been oppressed for generations, and who continue to be oppressed by laws, policies and cultural norms that were based on the fallacy of white supremacy. In many cases these are laws that were explicitly crafted to maintain a racial and gender hierarchy.

If we are unwilling to look at ourselves in the mirror, and speak honestly with one another about who we actually are today, we have little hope of advancing racial equity and becoming the country we all aspire to be in the future.

Of course, honesty in word but not in deed would not be radical at all. It would actually not even be honest. It’s essential that we translate radical honesty in our discourse into daily actions that ensure we are each meaningfully contributing to the dismantling of white supremacy and systemic racism.

Although this is societal work, and requires participation from all, it is most important for white people to commit to radical honesty, since white people, like me, are the most likely to avoid honest dialogue, benefit the most from the status quo, and hold disproportionate power in society.

Let us all courageously commit ourselves to radical honesty in word and deed, so that we can move with much greater speed together along our journey to become the country we set out to be so many years ago.

Letter to Our Community - January 2021

Dear Enroot Family,

I write once again with a heavy heart, all at once infuriated, ashamed, and deeply concerned. I never imagined I’d witness what took place in Washington D.C. yesterday.

Watching law enforcement permit and even encourage the actions of a violent mostly white mob as they stormed the US Capitol Building without arrest, while hundreds of lawmakers inside tried to vote to certify the presidential election, was not only concerning, it was deeply painful. It was painful to all who appreciate the sacred nature of a peaceful transfer of power, and understand the alternative. It was painful to all of us who have marched in Black Lives Matter protests and experienced enormous police and national guard response. It was perhaps most painful for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who for generations have endured brutal violence at the hands of police simply for walking down a street to peacefully protest blatant inequality. Although the double standards implicit in white privilege are omnipresent in this country, they have never been on greater display than they were yesterday.

Yesterday’s events were both an act of, and a manifestation of, white supremacy. They were only possible in a country which formally and informally treats its white residents as if they are superior, and therefore worthy of superior power, superior voice, superior protections. President Trump and the mob who stormed the Capitol are responsible for the specific events of yesterday, but we must all reflect on our own participation in a society that made this possible. We must ask ourselves, what is MY role in addressing the white supremacy so deeply embedded in our society that was laid bare at the Capitol? This moment should deepen our resolve to identify white supremacy in our daily lives and take daily action to dismantle it.

I’ve written before about how important it is that those of us committed to fighting for racial equity not be intimidated or even discouraged by those who seek to stop our progress. The Enroot community remains resolved in our fight for racial and educational equity, and steadfast in our support for the amazing immigrant students we work alongside. With truth firmly on our side, I know our peaceful pursuit of justice will prevail.

Thank you for your ongoing support of Enroot students and for intensifying your courageous participation in the fight for racial equity in the United States.

Ben Clark
Executive Director