PBN DIVERSITY & INCLUSIONS 2020 AWARDS
Education: Rhode Island for Community and Justice
FOR ROSE ALBERT and many others at Rhode Island for Community and Justice, 2020 has been a year of growth, a year of challenge and a year when new subsets of people in American society – and the world – came to grips with the realities of racial injustice that have been all too present for too long.
“The [COVID-19] pandemic meant that everyone was home and forced to watch George Floyd’s killing, and to see it and pay attention to it,” Albert said. “But situations like that happen all the time in our community and have been going on like that for years. The shift that has happened this year, because of COVID-19, was that everybody was home, and the busyness of their life wasn’t as distracting and all-consuming as usual.”
Albert, RICJ’s senior associate for youth programs, indicated that the technological shifts the pandemic prompted will leave the organization stronger in the long run. She said, in hindsight, the health crisis is pushing the Providence-based nonprofit, and the world, to think “outside the box.”
“In the past, we never had online meetings with students, and right now we are able to do so and make it more convenient and increase participation,” Albert said.
Albert has been involved with RICJ in one way or another for most of the last 12 years, describing her time there as “a long journey, and a beautiful journey.”
“When I was in high school, I was invited to participate in Project Respect, a summer camp that RICJ organized, and because of that, I was able to stay connected through their after-school youth action council program, and then went into different positions and grew with the organization,” Albert said.
After attending the camp herself, Albert became a counselor and eventually a director of RICJ-run camps. She said that the most memorable single experience for her and many Project Respect camp attendees was being part of an event called Gender Night. That’s when Albert said she realized that as a Black woman, people perceived her in all of the stereotypes that one can pick up.
“Wherever I go, I carry that with me. But just doing this exercise with other participants and having people tearing up when we all realized that we had the same experience was profound,” Albert said. “It is a cruel world out there, but when you have that solidarity of realizing that you are not alone with that, that’s important. It opened my mind to the fact that discrimination exists and is real, and also that there are other people who are experiencing it and standing up to it.”
Among the upcoming high school students active with RICJ whom Albert had worked with is Sarah Ortes, a senior at Classical High School who is helping launch a new project at the organization known as the Young Womxn’s Equity Coalition. Ortes said that the idea of the coalition is mentorship by women of color for women of color.
“We get to network with people who are older than us who can guide us and be there for us when we need them,” Ortes said. “It’s basically female empowerment, because there are a lot of things going on in the world. Women of color are very marginalized, so their accomplishments are different from the accomplishments of other women.”
Asked whether her peers at Classical are as politically engaged as she is and support her in her work at RICJ, Ortes drew an interesting distinction.
“I don’t think that I am politically engaged,” Ortes said. “I think that people confuse politics with social justice. But social justice is a different matter; I am more of a social justice-focused person. I don’t really talk to anyone about it, but the people I do talk to share that same passion for social justice.”
Above all, Ortes said she is grateful for the positive influence on her that RICJ has had. “I would say that RICJ is really helping me with my character development,” she said. “If I compare myself now with who I was when I started in the summer of 2019 going into my junior year of high school, I’m a completely different person.”