Monday, February 01, 2010
Winter 2010: A Kwanzaa Event for our Community
In our region, Casey Family Services hosts an annual winter Kwanzaa event. This year’s event was another great success. More than 70 people, including transracial adoptive families, transracial foster families, and families of color (and even some grandparents and relatives), gathered at our rural Casey office on a Sunday evening to re-affirm their sense of community and celebrate the seven principles of Kwanzaa:
- Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
- Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
- Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
- Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
- Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
- Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
- Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
As we enter Black History Month, I remain acutely conscious of the diversity journey we all are on. As professional of color who works in child welfare, I know the work that has gone before me - and continues with me and others - regarding addressing systemic bias and racism that still exists within the field. Until we can adequately serve the needs of all children and families of color in foster care and adoption, our work is not yet done.
