There is a crisis in Black health in Martin Luther King Jr. County. Along with jarring statistics highlighted above, we underscore again that there are zero Black community-owned, federally qualified health clinics in the entire Pacific Northwest (OR, WA, ID, MT, WY). It’s no wonder that Black people in King County contracted COVID-19 at 3x the rates of whites yet received less than 2% of the federal COVID-19 recovery funding. We have to change this. We can change this. Tap in and take action to base-build the only Black community owned health clinics in the PNW.

Support Black community owned health clinics like the Tubman Center for Health and Freedom (TCHF). TCHF is a community organization committed to the principles of healing and people’s liberation from systems that make us unwell. It works to advance health justice, culturally appropriate care and integrative medicine. It is a collective of community members laying the groundwork for an innovative Black community health clinic specializing in our needs.

In 2020, Black community mobilized tremendous community support to halt the predatory development of the Keiro site—nearly a full block in the heart of the Central District. This historic, cross-community, anti-gentrification project has received huge support from City and State officials. We’re now in the home-stretch to make this national model a reality. Use your voice in support, below.

Surge envisions a world where all communities are free from reproductive oppression, racism, and violence. Their values are fundamental principles that guide actions and inform organizational decisions. Surge's values foster strategies for advancing reproductive justice. These strategies may include law and policy, education and outreach, advocacy and community organizing, or other vehicles for change.

Help Nurturing Roots - an incredible Black-led grassroots community farm in Beacon Hill - activate Red Barn Ranch - 47 acres of underutilized land in Auburn owned by Seattle Parks

For Seattle area Black Education Advocate Emijah Smith, the start of school is a reminder of the work that still needs to be done. Smith who is an education expert with King County Equity Now (KCEN) and a parent with a student in Seattle Public Schools points to what has been chronic and systemic failures of Black students in Seattle Public Schools over the past few decades as the core motivation for her work.

Nurturing Roots Farm is leading a collaborative effort to transform ~40 acres of vacant land into a Black-led farming, healing space, and foundation for youth empowerment. Organizing and working tirelessly with community partners for over a year, this incredible cause has gained thousands upon thousands of community allies in support. Read more and support this effort here.

Rising housing costs and predatory development have forced East African and other Black immigrant groups further and further south, outside of Seattle. Read on to support EACS in building the Family Empowerment Center to help create permanence and agency for East African refugee and immigrant youth and families in Othello!

After seven years of Black community advocacy, the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation and Enterprise is finally moving forward! The soon-to-be William Grose Center reflects a deep history of local Black activism to reclaim the property and other parcels of unused public land in the region. Read on to learn more and support this work.

The Petah Village project pilots an outdoor preschool located on 1.4 acres of green space, and a 2700 square-foot facility to serve 81 children. The expansion of Petah Villages serves as a pro-Black programmatic service within a continuum of care to address systemic inequitable barriers for Black, Brown and Indigenous communities toward accessible, high-quality early childhood education, housing stability, and economic, workforce development services. Click to learn more and support.

In 2020, Black community mobilized tremendous community support to halt the predatory development of the Keiro site — nearly a full block in the heart of the Central District. Building on the legacy of the Liberty Bank Building, Africatown Community Land Trust is moving forward to purchase the building with plans to develop Black community-led and -centered affordable housing and wraparound and direct services! Read more and take action in support of this historic model below.

The Washington State Housing Finance Commission reportedly planned NOT TO FUND any affordable housing projects within the City of Seattle in 2021 effectively excluding Black-led projects including Africatown Plaza, Elizabeth Thomas Homes and Ethiopian Village from accessing critical resources. KCEN and ACLT led an advocacy campaign to stop this.

KCEN's 2020 Juneteenth Celebration marched through Seattle’s Central District, with frequent stops to point out historical spots significant to the city’s Black community. The Freedom March, both a celebration of freedom and a protest against persistent anti-Black racism, began at 2 p.m. Friday, June 19 at DeCharlene’s Beauty Salon, at East Madison Street and 22nd Avenue East. Marchers walked down 23rd Avenue until they hit Jimi Hendrix Park, where organizers are putting together a people’s assembly — complete with food, musical performances and speakers.

Read our running, inaugural watch list of bills that pose opportunity to do good. Follow-along in the coming weeks as we organize and continue to uplift ways to engage and support these bills and build equity in Washington State.

Celebrate our latest advocacy win! With community, our advocacy helped protect an entire block in the Central District from market rate development. Instead, it will go to Black community ownership towards Bennu Community Homes! Bennu Community Homes will be a 24/7, enhanced shelter home offering culturally responsive, trauma-informed care & wraparound services incl. health, education, employment, and housing navigation resources. It will be the first Black community-owned, Black-led unhoused service provider of scale in WA State.

We collectively call on Children’s Hospital’s donors to redirect funding to solutions that actually work to serve Black peoples. We call on Children’s Hospital to: cede ownership of Odessa Brown, put 10 years of operating funds to Black community to base-build the site; immediately inject funding into Black-led health organizations before the 2021 year-end; immediately fire CEO Jeffrey Sperring; and remove Board Chair Susan Betcher. Take action.

Black community leaders, members, business owners, and elected officials came together to address the State of Black Community in COVID-19, and present the collective demand to invest at least $300 million dollars from the recently awarded American Relief Plan Act (ARPA) funding directly into the local Black community.

COVID-19 has laid bare once again the glaring implications of hundreds of years of anti-Black racism. That a global pandemic would widely, disproportionately harm Black community is not surprising. Take action to ensure the Seattle City Council equitably distributes relief funding by committing at least $100M to Black communities directly.

At the federal level, one of the largest and least-elevated stories is the immense, anti-Black wealth transfer of the federal COVID-19 relief programs. Specifically, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that awarded over $542 billion in aid to U.S. businesses and organizations. Less than two percent of that aid reached Black-owned entities!

Spearheaded by The Ethiopian Community in Seattle (ECS), The Ethiopian Village Project will provide many critical services including after school programing, senior meal programs, health workshops, social services, summer camps, coding training, cultural immersion courses and more along with 90 units of affordable housing for seniors in South Seattle. Learn more and support.

In the midst of a citywide affordable housing crisis, Catholic Housing Services and Equity Alliance of Washington, in partnership with the Rainier Beach Action Coalition (RBAC) seek to develop the community-oriented Elizabeth Thomas Homes Project in Rainier Beach.

A constellation of educators, lawyers, and activists successfully called for the transfer of underutilized public land to Black community ownership. KCEN set forth several demands for handing over vacant lots, a nursing home, and other properties to Black community ownership, in addition to establishing a $500 million anti-gentrification land acquisition fund. The long-term goal: racially equitable outcomes in metrics like homeownership, wealth, and college attainment in King County by 2038, the 75th anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Based on a misalignment of values and strategic analysis, we do not accept Seattle's PB efforts in its current form. The current process is still being shaped and with much room for improvement, KCEN will continue our work in community to ensure that our, many others’ significant efforts in advocating and manifesting this policy, and importantly, the views of 1000s Black community members that supported the PB process through our platform, are appropriately honored.

Watch the latest feature on the soon-to-be William Grose Center and the deep history of Black activism to reclaim the property and other parcels of unused public land in the region.

Today’s Central District activists are looking to continue Grose’s legacy as the city’s first Black landowner, via a community land trust — a nonprofit entity that collectively owns and holds property for community uses like housing. “We need a new normal rooted in equity,” said K. Wyking Garrett, president and CEO of the Africatown Community Land Trust. “And equity means ownership.”

One-quarter of the entire 2020 Seattle city budget was allocated to the Seattle Police Department (SPD). While last summer’s protests over anti-Black police violence and calls to defund the police resulted in an 18% decrease in the 2021 SPD budget, $364 million was still allocated to SPD. This is an affront to community-led organizations like King County Equity Now (KCEN) and so many others who have been providing much-needed community support and succeeding in creating real public safety.

The vision for a new William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation at the landmarked station property is the most well-shaped and long-formed project. Discussion of community ownership of the facility first began in 2012 as the city was looking to sell the property. The new Station 6 opened in 2013 on MLK. In 2015, the city began a process for community groups to take over the building but the stages of the effort dragged on. Along the way, ideas and needs for the station came and went.

On the Washington State Housing Finance Commission's exclusion of Black-led projects and processes: "when we look at who is actually benefiting, who is generating wealth, who is getting the primary economic gain or the lion’s share of the economic gain related to these development projects, it’s very much not reflective of the community to be impacted." Read on.

#DefundSPD is rooted in the principle that dealing with making our communities safer includes addressing the violence in our community as a cultural and public safety issue. Taxpayers should get a better return on their investments. Citizens should demand more effective solutions and better outcomes for the dollars invested. Police don’t stop crime. They respond to crime.

Africatown's art curation will feature art by African American artists for over 20 different locations throughout the project - including opportunities for sculpture, integrated art, a mural and virtual reality art installations!

The Aligning Forces for Sustainability award will honor King County Equity Now (KCEN) for its work against systemic and superficial racism, wasteful capitalist models, and extractive relationships that lack reciprocity. KCEN's solutions for Black equity include maximizing underutilized land under the leadership of Black-led community organizations, halting gentrification in the Central District and other historic areas of color, and establishing a $1 billion land acquisition fund to help the Black community acquire property.

Just a few latest land wins:

• $150 million in increased community development for affordable housing from the Washington State Housing Finance Commission;
• $27 million for Africatown Plaza towards Black community-centered spaces and replicable, scalable models to halt the impacts of gentrification; and
• $4.5M for the Keiro project (plus halting a full block of predatory development in the heart of the Central District to create the opportunity for Black community equity in the first place).

At the center of defunding, King County Equity Now’s platform focuses on community ownership of land, along with acquiring funding to address the root of inequities. At the crux of the group’s vision was a solution that community members had sought for many years without success: to defund the police and reallocate that funding to Black-led organizations.

“People have asked me if I wanted to own it, but no, I want it to be all of ours,” said Nyema Clark, the founder and director of Nurturing Roots, during an interview with the Emerald in October. “All of us should have a share, and that share should never be able to be sold. You could pass it down to other generations, but you couldn’t make money off of it. We want to make a legitimate model that lasts.”

For Nyema Clark, Black liberation looks like 40 or so acres in Auburn, Washington. It’s called Red Barn Ranch, and it belongs to Seattle Parks & Recreation.

It hasn’t been used in years, but soon Nyema Clark will enliven its soil, and invite people to heal and grow. To reap and sow. She will call this land the “Red, Black and Green Barn Ranch” – to honor the colors of Black liberation. When she works the land, she feels whole. "I feel like my ancestors are talking to me,” she says.

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Monday to transfer two long-sought Central District properties back to the Black community after years of hope and promises including pledges from Mayor Jenny Durkan this summer as Black Lives Matter movement demonstrations grew in Seattle.

Read on to learn about the Black education rally in South Seattle where Black youth, community leaders and organizers uplifted youth-led education demands.

Learn more about William Grose, a Seattle pioneer, builder, businessman, entrprenuer and hotellier that helped build the Central District - Seattle's historically Black neighborhood, and greater Seattle.

Africatown has teamed up with Africatown Center for Education and Innovation and Blacks at Microsoft to teach youth how to use tech to innovate our communities! Join us and register for the event on May 8th, 2021 at 10am!

“To prove that Black lives matter, local government will need to invest in those communities, said Isaac Joy, president of King County Equity Now (KCEN), on a May 17 call on the “State of the Black community in COVID.” Read on.

King County Equity Now mobilized its full base around key sites it wanted to acquire – and won. In June, the City of Seattle announced it would transfer several vacant properties, including a decommissioned fire station that will become the William Grose Center for Cultural Enterprise. “If we’re moving in lockstep I don’t think anything can get in our way,” said Joy.

A property that once provided shelter for Japanese American war veterans is likely to become the site of subsidized housing that could be owned by Black community organizations. After a long journey through multiple phases and owners, the now-shuttered Keiro Rehabilitation and Care Center is currently on its way to be sold to Africatown Community Land Trust, a consortium that promotes the return of gentrified Black people to the Central District.

King County Equity Now announced on July 3 that Shelter Holdings agreed to halt its development of the former Keiro site—nearly a full block, situated squarely in the Central Area. After immense public pushback from the Black community for Shelter Holdings’ role in gentrification and the Central Area’s displacement, Shelter Holdings agreed to transfer the property to the Black community.

Nearly 200 Black-owned businesses participated in “Honoring Our Black Wall Streets” on Memorial Day in the Central District, to honor Black Wall Street on the 100th Anniversary of its tragic destruction. The memorial event was organized by King County Equity Now, Black Dot, and Africatown Community Land Trust and celebrated the resilience of the local Black business community.

Thousands gathered at 22nd & Madison in the Central District to kick off the Juneteenth rally and march, and honor the late DeCharlene Williams, who founded the Central Area Chamber of Commerce and brought Juneteenth to Seattle nearly 40 years ago, according to King County Equity Now. The crowd then marched to Jimi Hendrix Park, where a celebration commenced - including a Black graduation procession, Black business promotion, soul food, a teach-in, musical performances and more.

Read live Seattle Times Coverage of our historic Juneteenth Freedom March & Celebration in 2020. On the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth, a celebration since the late 1800s of the struggle for Black freedom, we honored those who were enslaved and continue to be enslaved, and demanded Black equity. We moved through the Central District, educating supporters on local history, and ended with Black singers, poets, rappers, dancers, leaders and artists at Jimi Hendrix Park.

Take action to build equity in the Black community. Building equity builds power. Building Black community power benefits us all. Click here to tap in.

When we say equity, we mean ownership. Thriving Black communities require control and agency over land. We prioritize Black land acquisition as a foundational pillar to our work.

Seattle, Martin Luther King Jr. County boasts some of the most sophisticated, renowned hospitals and medical facilities in the world. The disparities in medical treatment received by the Black communities are appalling, with COVID-19 serving as just the most recent flashlight into this dark and disturbing reality. Read on to support a suite of initial health equity solutions to combat this.

Take action in support of youth-led Black education solutions including community-owned schools, restorative justice, Black studies, building youth achievement and family empowerment centers in South Seattle and more.

We advocate strongly to divest from policing and invest directly in the Black community toward self-determined, pro-Black safety solutions.

Black wealth in 2020 remains near zero due to centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Persistent anti-Black barriers keep the Black community from gaining equitable access to capital. Tap in to learn more and take action to stop it.