Shakara Tyler earned her PhD from MSU from the Department of Community Sustainability in 2019. She’s currently the board president of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and a co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. And she works with several Black agrarian organizations around the country.
Donations to black-led food and land organizations shift from charitable giving to true reparations
Transferring wealth to Black-led groups is a particularly potent form of reparations with immediate benefits to communities of color.
Last December, nonprofit executive director Malik Yakini received an unexpected call. The caller, a woman who resides in California, said she wanted to direct a sizeble portion of her inheritance to his organization, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.
This type of windfall is indeed rare, but it was the caller’s motivation revealed over several conversations with Yakini that was really unusual.
She felt there was “some lack of justice in how the money was acquired” and that she could “contribute to greater justice” by transferring wealth to groups engaged in Black, land-related projects, Yakini recalls. “She sees her work in making these donations as specifically a type of individual reparations.”
‘Long distance runners’ needed in activism, UM panelists say during MLK keynote address
Updated Jan 18, 2021;
Posted Jan 18, 2021
Panelists Gloria House and Malik Yakini speak about the impact of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his influence on their own work as activists in past decades during UM’s MLK Symposium keynote Monday, Jan. 18.Image provided | University of Michigan
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ANN ARBOR, MI At a time when many in the United States are asking, “Where do we go from here?” panelists at the University of Michigan examined the question in light of the legacy left by the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.