Uprising in Philadelphia: A to-do list for the next six months

The first six months of 2020 have been momentous — serving up a devastating pandemic, a precipitous economic downturn, and a long overdue reckoning with the racial and economic injustices so deeply a part of our nation’s bedrock they give lie to the idea of the American Dream.

“O, yes, I say it plain, America was never America to me,” the poet Langston Hughes wrote in 1935, and we’re finally beginning to heed the truth of his words some 85 years later.

The expansive (and sustained) uprising that has taken place in cities (and towns) across the nation since late May has been a belated wake-up call about the anti-Black racism that not only shapes nearly every one of our institutions, but also underpins our national character and legacy.

In Philadelphia, home to more than 9.000 nonprofits — 1,886 of them foundations with collective assets of $15.1 Billion — the uprising has prompted a further reckoning. Long focused on doing good in the nation’s poorest big city, Philadelphia nonprofits are now examining how their practices and processes have made them complicit — by action or inaction — in the inequities at the heart of the uprising.

Strong voices have emerged from the nonprofit sector during this crucible of change.

To read the full article by Sabrina Vourvoulias, click here. Joe Pyle, President of the Scattergood Foundation was featured in the article alongside other non-profit leaders in the Philadelphia region.