David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Alphabet; Bryan Stevenson, Founder and CEO, Equal Justice Initiative; Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Founder, Roses in Concrete Community School; Landon Dickey*, Special Assistant for African American Achievement & Leadership, San Francisco Unified School District; Alexandra Bernadotte, Founder and CEO, Beyond 12; Richard Carranza, Superintendent, San Francisco Unified School District; and Justin Steele, Principal, Google.org
Google.org has awarded a total of $3 million in grants to San Francisco Unified School District’s My Brother and Sister’s Keeper program (MBSK), Oakland’s Roses in Concrete Community School, Beyond 12 and Equal Justice Initiative, all of which are local organizations working to eliminate racial bias either in the education system or in local communities.
Back in November, Google.org announced $2.35 million in grants to Oakland’s Ella Baker Center, the Oakland Unified School District’s African American Male Achievement program and Silicon Valley De-Bug. Those grants, as well as the ones announced today, are part of Google.org’s effort to fight for racial justice.
Citing the murders of young African-Americans like Tamir Rice and Jordan Davis, “Google and our own industry need to do more to promote equality and opportunities for all,” Google.org Principal Justin Steele wrote in a blog post. “Social innovators can help us move closer to our ideals of equality and justice. That’s why last year, Google.org launched a new, dedicated effort to support leaders who are doing critical work to end mass incarceration and combat endemic educational inequality for black and brown students.”
Here’s how the $3 million is divvied up:
- SFUSD’s MBSK, which aims to empower African-American high school seniors with the information and tools to enroll in college, received a $1 million grant.
- The Equal Justice Initiative, which “aims to counter the presumption of guilt and dangerousness in communities of color today, through education programs that help Americans reframe our relationship to our history of racial oppression,” also received a $1 million grant. Some of that money will go toward initiatives like marking thousands of lynching sites and building the country’s first lynching memorial.
- $750,000 went to Roses in Concrete, a new kind of school in Oakland focused on community responsive teaching, which takes into account the hardships students and their families may face on an everyday basis.
- $250,000 went to Beyond 12, an organization trying to increase the number of low-income, first-generation and historically underrepresented students who graduate from college through digital coaching.
Disclosure: Landon Dickey, Special Assistant for African American Achievement & Leadership, San Francisco Unified School District, is my older brother.