George Jones on Building Antiracist Cities
About This Episode
George Jones is the CEO of Washington, DC-based Bread for the City, which supports people living with low incomes to develop their power to determine the future of their own communities. They provide food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services to reduce the burden of poverty. And in working to solve some of the cities most pressing challenges, George Jones is one of the very best.
That’s what you get when you discover your calling at 12-years-old, as George did, realizing early on that his journey was one rooted in justice and equity. Today, he lives at the intersection of race, racism, and poverty, and through Bread for the City and his work as an evangelist for equity he carries his believe that DC can be not just an antiracist city, but a beloved city of peace and equity.
Today, George sits down with Carrie to talk about the root causes that exist around poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity in DC, but we hope you learn, too, that missions can come from anywhere, at any age, and his is a model and inspiration for us all. Our great thanks to George Jones for his wisdom this week.
-
Carrie Fox:
Hi there, and welcome to The Mission Forward podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B Corporation. Today, we are inviting you to join us for a very special conversation with George Jones. George is the CEO of Washington DC-based Bread for the City, which supports people living with low incomes to develop their power to determine the future of their own communities. They provide food, clothing, medical care, and legal and social services to reduce the burden of poverty. What I will tell you is that George is one of Washington DC's most effective leaders working to solve some of the city's most pressing challenges.
So effective, in fact, that Georgetown University honored him a few years back with the John Thompson Jr. Legacy of a Dream Award. What I love about George, though, is not the awards he's won, but that he doesn't exist to advance just the mission of Bread for the City, he exists to address solutions to the root causes that exist around poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity in DC, and I think that's what you will take away from learning from him today. George, as we get into the conversation, as you know on this show, we talk about the role that communications plays in social change, and clearly, you have seen the effect of that up close. We'll get into that in a little bit. But first, welcome, and I'd love if you help ground us today by telling us a little bit about your own journey as a communicator for change.
George Jones:
Thanks, Carrie, for having me on. As you say, I'm George Jones. I'm the CEO of Bread for the City. I've been at Bread for the City for over 27 years now, and it really has been a journey. Actually, my entire professional career has been centered around social justice, centered around providing services and supporting communities with folks who are living on low incomes. In some ways it feels like I've had two phases of my career. Early on, a lot of the work was really focused on the direct services piece, making sure that at every stop I was trying to address in some instances, access to employment, access to training opportunities, and more access to housing. But more recently, when I actually came to Bread for the City from Los Angeles in 1996, what I found at Bread and what I was asked to help lead at Bread was this effort to provide this holistic array of services to community members living in DC who were living on low incomes.
So at Bread, as you said earlier, we provide food and clothing and medical and legal and social services. That was really what we were grounded in the mid to late 1990s, and that was important work. It still remains important work, it remains a real central part of how Bread for the City tries to address poverty. But in the 2000s, particularly late 2009, '10, and really right at 2011 I would say was when in a lot of ways, there was a game-changing moment for Bread and for me. By that time, been at Bread for gosh, almost 15 years. "One day I got cornered by some staff who said to me, "George," it was right after Trayvon Martin was killed. They said to me, "Hey, have you ever wondered why the only people who seem to come into Bread for the City ... " and we were seeing literally thousands of people every month seeking out services, and they said, "The only people who come here are Black people or Brown people or people of color. You've ever asked yourself that question?"
I hadn't really analyzed what that was all about, the intersection between race and poverty, but the challenge they threw out to me is to go through, take racial equity training. I went through a training back in 2011, 2012 that really helped me gain an analysis of the intersection between race, racism and poverty. That was really important because one of the things you learned in that space is the role of power. I have happened to be blessed with a certain amount of power at Bread for the City. So I was able to really quickly make the decision that all of our staff would go through the training, and ultimately, we got the board to commit to going through this training.
That was really important because when we made that decision, we decided to go from just thinking about the direct services, what we now call downstream work, providing services to people where they are, people who are already living in poverty, to try to go upstream and really think about. How do you interrupt the systems that we really believe perpetuate the situation and the existence of poverty in DC and probably throughout the country? So that's been a really big part of the story. And I look forward to talking a little bit about what that means. I also look forward to talking about how we've been telling that story on our blog posts, on our website. I've probably done a number of interviews, telling the story about Bread's journey, my own personal journey and what that's meant in terms of changing how we fight poverty in DC.
Carrie Fox:
I so appreciate where you started, George, because I remember those years, 2008, 2009, 2010, there were these aha moments happening in social services that I think continue to happen. Sometimes those aha moments happen earlier, sometimes they happen later in an organization's life cycle. But that opportunity to think bigger and more holistically about the way that your organization was showing up in service of a larger, greater good, beyond sometimes what I think about as the production value of a nonprofit, right? It's not just about delivering services, it's about something much deeper than that.
George Jones:
Yeah. This idea of how do you really make an impact that transcends the direct services we deliver and really, as I said, goes upstream and really work with policy makers and work with the other civic leaders to really understand how do we collectively change what's happening in our communities in a way that hopefully, one day really reduces the amount of folks who come in need of these direct services because we have systems that work much better. We have a city, if you will, that provides opportunity in a more equitable and just way.
Carrie Fox:
Right. Right. What an incredible goal that is to really be focused on that idea of not just breaking the cycle of poverty, which we know is a very complicated goal to break, but to think about the role that every individual and every organization can play to advancing a more just and equitable society in the world.
George Jones:
That's right. Yeah. This question about, I think when Bread started to talk about this and my staff taught to push me, to their credit, to be more progressive, to be more outspoken about what can be done, I had some skepticism myself about what can an organization do about these major challenges, these things that have existed for decades, scores of years, if not hundreds of years? What could a Bread for the City do to change the what was happening, the trajectory of poverty and the outcomes for people living in DC? What I discovered is that everybody can do something, like individuals can certainly, minimally individuals who care about justice and want to help their fellow community members do better, there's a way to learn what we can do as individuals, how we can undo some of the thinking that we have about why people are poor, the thinking we have about government and its role in helping fight poverty.
Then we can think, and particularly those of who are leading organizations like Bread for the City, and Bread probably would be considered a large non-profit, we are now a $22 million organization, but when I got here some 30 years ago, nearly 30 years ago, we were just under $2 million as an organization, so we were relatively small, we have really seen a little bit like Margaret Mead said that don't doubt that a handful of people can change the world. In some ways, it's the only thing that has. So I think we've adopted that belief that the 140 employees who work here at Bread for the City, the board members, we all believe that we can not only help change what's happening in Bread for the City, but using our voices, communicating our story can really help inform what the city does to try to fight poverty in a more comprehensive way.
Carrie Fox:
George, I suspect there are probably days that this work feels like a job for you and probably a very heavy job, but I suspect there's probably more days than not that it feels deeper than a job. I'm curious if you're willing to take us way back. We know you've been with Bread for the City since 1996. What was your journey to Bread for the City? What kind of influences did you have along the way that brought you here?
George Jones:
I love answering that question, 'cause there really is a story. I was about 12-years-old when I decided I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to help people. Of course, as a 12-year-old, I didn't know that really meant, what that was called, but there was something very much intrinsic in who I was that said that I wanted to do something to help people. My inspiration was, not surprisingly, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., like he was for so many people. I was born in 1960, so I was a young child of the Civil Rights movement and so I knew his story as a child knows it, but I was inspired so much by this challenge to serve people, which was part of his message is that service was so important and that that was the legacy we should all try to leave in our lifetime.
So the early on, I knew I wanted to do something that by the time I got to college, I majored in psychology. I started to get a handle on what that would be, how I could live out that calling, if you will, to service. My first job, I had had an internship at a nonprofit in Chesapeake, Virginia, which is near my hometown of Norfolk, Virginia. That was when I really saw firsthand what the work looked like. I worked at a nonprofit that worked with folks who were suffering from mental illness, and that was an eye-opening experience. It was confirmation for me that this is what I wanted to do. I think some people get in those spaces and maybe get overwhelmed by it and really make the decision that maybe it isn't for them, but it was confirmation. I enjoyed that job. I worked for seven years in that space.
I ultimately ended up moving out to California and worked for another nonprofit that interesting enough changed the kind of approach it had to poverty. That's the other thing I think I learned in my journey is that there's so many challenges for people who are living in disadvantaged situations. In that space, Los Angeles had the largest home ... I think they still do, had the largest number of people experiencing homelessness. I went and got a job in Skid Row in Los Angeles and worked there for seven years. Our focus was to try to figure out how to help people get off the streets, to get clean and sober, to get back into work. So my early training and my early story is all about direct service. It's all about getting involved, really getting your hands dirty, trying to figure out how to help individuals who were struggling with any number of issues that really had them living in poverty.
I think there were 10,000 people at the time living in Los Angeles who were experiencing homelessness just in that downtown area called Skid Row, but it was such a powerful thing. Again, the thing I can say so honestly today is it was so clear to me that that was where I was supposed to be. That was what I was supposed to be doing. I just loved doing that work and loved this opportunity to try to make a difference in the lives of others. It was important work, it was rewarding. I got to elevate it to some supervision roles there. Ultimately, I became effectively the deputy director at that organization. That was where I really got some management experience that would really be really important when I finally decided to move back East and apply for the job at Bread for the City. At the time, the title was executive director. Ultimately, it was changed to CEO.
But I came in and when I interviewed for the job, I remember telling the folks, the board that I interviewed with, that I saw myself as a servant leader, that that's the style of leadership that really defined how I would approach helping lead Bread for the City. I hope that that's been true, that in a lot of ways, service to the people who work here at Bread are always trying to figure out a way to make Bread a more equitable just place for the people who work for us, and certainly, service to the community members that the tens of thousands, we serve probably 30,000 unique individuals every year at Bread for the City and trying to figure out how to make sure that my contribution to the work of serving those community members is a servant leadership style. But again, it takes me back to this idea of finding a voice for the organization around racial justice, social justice.
I think it's the thing that's been the hallmark of the last decade of my journey and speaking out and speaking to people who want to understand, again, this intersection between racism and race and poverty, trying to help people understand that there is a historic link to those things. Starting from slavery all the way to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights period and Separate but Equal, this country's been on the journey really trying to undo and reverse all the ill effects that all are rooted in the original sense of slavery here. So helping people understand that story, but definitely understand in a real practical way that there are practical things we can do to reverse the impact. A lot of that centers around one of the things that's really important is to talk about the difference between equality and equity. That's been one of the real important lessons.
I think it's been in the American kind of ethos that equality was the thing to be lifted up, and we get the spirit of that. But the truth of the matter is, again, I think Dr. King was one of the people who said, I don't think he originated it, but the quote he has is that there's nothing so unequal as treating people who are in unequal situations equally. So that's what we learned in this equity space is that when people have been and a race of people have been denied opportunities, whether it's in housing or employment or education or in terms of wealth building, all of the things that when people turn to us, we find that folks have been denied opportunities in all those spaces. You're talking about people who are now in unequal situations with the rest of us who live in privilege, who've had opportunities to go to college and to build wealth and to find jobs that pay living wages. So that's the dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots, if you will.
It requires an equitable response, something that is going to be responsive to the disparity between the things that those of us who have guide these privileges have, and the things that folks who come to Bread for the City lack every day. They lack access to affordable housing, to fresh and accessible food and to jobs that pay a living wage or more, and the ability to create wealth, and so that's a part of the story. It's the thing that people who really want to take on this work will learn and learn how to undo 'cause we think that there are ways to really reverse those trends and eliminate those disparities, but we have to be intentional about it. We have to be committed to it. Bread for the City has said that in this new mission statement, that that's what it's about. We've been trying to spread that message throughout this community. We believe that DC as a whole can be what we call an anti-racist city. We believe that it can be a city that intentionally eliminates the socioeconomic disparities that so many of the people at Bread for the City serves experience.
Carrie Fox:
So what's striking me as I'm listening to you, George, is I suspect there are a lot of people who think broadly or specifically about Washington DC and can name things that are wrong with this city. But I suspect that the gift that you have and your colleagues have is that you can see the city and its people and its potential in a slightly different light, in a different frame of reference. So I'd love you to talk about how you see your city, and then let's talk about what an anti-racist city can look like too.
George Jones:
Absolutely. Well, I see a city that is, particularly the residents of this city, people who, as you said, they really see the challenges and want to ... Again, you rarely talk to a person here who doesn't want to help eliminate, or at least doesn't envision a city where we don't have all these socioeconomic disparities that play themselves out between people of color and people who identify as white, the housing unit and the income and the health outcomes. You look at our socioeconomic in DC and the disparities between Black and white and Brown and white are just glaring. They're just extreme. But if you talk to the residents in Washington, DC no matter what ethnicity of race they identify with, they would all say that those disparities are horrific, and we need to figure out something to do to eliminate them.
I think what I'm excited about, and what I'm glad you really have given me a chance to share is and this anti-racist DC campaign that I and several other DC activists are have been really trying to advance for the last almost two years now and trying to create an audience of folks who will get behind this campaign is the promise that you alluded to, that the promise is this, that in a city of 700,000 people, many of who are very much among the privileged, very much well off that those folks have power. Our theory is that there are at least nine sectors in DC that would be important to come together collectively to utilize the power to both analyze the challenges that are driving these disparities and then utilize the power that these sectors have, particularly when they work collectively together.
The sectors include business and labor and academia and nonprofits and philanthropy, government, faith-based groups, community itself. In fact, I should start with community, centering community members in this work. If we could bring all those sectors together, I really, really believe, I think our organizing committee, as we call ourselves, the Anti-Racist DC Organizing Committee, really believes that we could collectively come together and think about how do we behave in anti-racist ways? How do we create anti-racist policies? How do we create anti-racist behaviors? How do we create anti-racist goals and objectives?
Of course, the ultimate anti-racist goals and objectives is to eliminate those disparities. If we do all of that and we do it at scale, in other words, if enough of us come together, if we're talking about thousands of people in this city all committing to those goals, those objectives and those and behaviors, and we do it over a long period of time, we've marked a decade as the time period that we could see real change. I've talked about eliminating those disparities altogether. But let's face it, even if we reduced them by half in a decade, people one, the needle would be moved so dramatically you'd see those changes in terms of the quality of life in DC for people who historically have lived in poverty. I think we'd really create a sense on moving forward that we can do this, that we can make the changes.
You said earlier, you mentioned the term breaking the cycle of poverty. In a way, that's an old concept, but in a lot of ways, that's a simple way of talking about what we are here. The other thing that I think is, at least my own personal ambition or vision about this, is there's another term that oftentimes associated with Dr. King, which is creating a beloved community. So when you think about, yes, changing these outcomes in these indices in the life trajectory for people of color, and particularly young people, kids, some who are unborn now, that's a powerful thing. It's a technical thing and a noble goal. But the beloved community would be about creating a group of people who were committed to doing that moving forward, who would see that as a way of life, of becoming together, staying together as a community. So it wouldn't just be a moment of time when we would eliminate those disparities, but we'd keep them from ever showing up again in this city.
Carrie Fox:
George, the balance between those two concepts, as you noted in an old outdated frame of reference, breaking the cycle of poverty to a modern, optimistic, progressive view of creating a beloved community. The difference between the two of one is focused on the broken, the other is a community collectively coming together-
George Jones:
Absolutely.
Carrie Fox:
... to support its own success and future.
George Jones:
And creating relationships that are just as vital, if not more vital to eliminating the outcomes. We really think that it's the relationships that will hold us, that will bind us as we work together, 'cause you've said this to me earlier, the work is difficult work. We talk about leaning into the difficulty of bringing about racial equity. There is that challenge if you have to lean into it because you have to commit to things like non-closure. We liken in our society to have a very linear, you do one and two gets you three. That's not really how this work will go. There'll be two steps forward and one backwards. We know that it's going to be challenging, and we'll be asking people to exercise civic and philosophical muscles that they haven't really exercised maybe in their own lifetime, because and to a large degree, they may have been working individually towards their own personal goals.
Carrie Fox:
You know what? There's no roadmap for it because we are, as you said, we're built, we're a society, we are a nation that's built on some falsehoods. So we almost need to create that roadmap in real time around how you get to the vision of a beloved community.
George Jones:
In our movement, we're talking about co-creating, I'm glad you used the term creating 'cause we use the term co-creating the solutions. People oftentimes ask me, "George, tell me what the goals." I say, "You don't want me to tell you what they are, but I'm inviting you to the table to help co-create how we get to this beloved community, how we get to this place where these disparities just don't disproportionately affect one group of people over another." Again, the beauty of DC is that it's rare that you'll find somebody who doesn't say that they can get behind that premise. Whether they're Black or white, they believe that these disparities shouldn't fall along racial lines.
Carrie Fox:
There is something, it's underpinning everything you have said so far. I'll just reinforce it because I think it's so important is relationships and that we cannot ever get to a beloved community without relationships. We cannot ever see a different future than the one we are living without relationships. There was someone who came on the podcast a while back, her name is Mia Birdsong, and she wrote a book called How We Show Up, and she talks quite a bit about the power of community and relationship and actually, redefining what community is and how to be in it together, and that it's not, nothing about the work you are doing is a simple problem and there is no simple solution. So this idea, as you noted from A to B equals C or one, two equals three, it's so much more complex than that. The power of what you've started to frame out here, the roadmap for an anti-racist city is grounded in relationships first. Am I hearing that right?
George Jones:
That's right. So that's the work that we've been about. A lot of people ask, "When are we going to start dealing with the policies and doing ... ?" We are like, "We have to come together around our relationships. We have to bring people from all these sectors to the table, particularly people who have lived experiences, the community members and the leaders in these sectors, and we need to come together and build community at that level and relationships at that level, because hopefully, that'll be what really bolsters us, really keeps us committed during those tough times." There'll be tough times, whether we have a down spiral in the economy or some incident that breaks out in the city. We need the kind of relationships and unity of purpose that won't allow us to quit when the going gets tough.
Carrie Fox:
So let me ask you a tough question, and maybe there's no answer to it, but I'm thinking about all of those in our city of Washington DC who have been harmed by systems, who don't have trust in the systems that exist, and yet, we know trust is needed for those strong relationships and for this work to advance. How do you see organizations, or maybe it's even elected officials in DC thinking about how do we build that trust? How do we foster the trust to be able to have the kind of deep conversations that I know that's what you're envisioning?
George Jones:
Well, again, I think we're going to lean on this idea of centering community members, their voices, their physical presence in this work, and that's challenging. It means you have to resource that. You have to make sure that community members who oftentimes don't have the kind of flexibility that a CEO of a nonprofit has who controls his own schedule and has disposable income and can rely on an assistant to do some of the work back at the office or a team of people while he's out at a meeting, we've got to really accommodate for that. A lot of that really means resourcing and supporting those community members who have the limited experiences, who probably, as you said, struggle with trust to some degree and know where they've been disappointed in how systems have failed them personally, they can talk firsthand about that. We need those voices in the room. So that's going to be a big part of our approach to this work. We need them to be in leadership to some degree, which again, means supporting them.
The other thing we need is to talk about relationship building. I think both the analysis about anti-racism, which is a real thing people can go through and really get a sense of ... Really to answer what I find with that training is you answer some of the questions you have about how this all fits together. You really should understand how to connect the dots and that really, I think, gives people confidence that, "Okay, there's a real explanation about how we got where we are, and I can see the vision, I can begin to see the vision of how we can undo where we are." But I think the other thing is something I'm just starting to explore myself is this idea of restorative justice, 'cause the beauty of restorative justice, and not only does it speak to how do you get justice for people who've been harmed in whether it's an individual case or by the government or by a system that they've tried to trust, there's an approach to a clinical, almost approach to restorative justice. But the other thing about restorative justice, it also starts with developing relationships.
One of the things that the experts in restorative justice tell you is one of the best ways to build relationships is to allow people to tell their stories. I've been really moved as I've read some of the literature by this premise that start with letting the person who's been harmed just tell their story. There's something powerful about the ability to talk about whether it's in a housing system that's harmed somebody, or an individual that's harmed somebody, or even a nonprofit that's harmed people. One of the things I've really gotten into practice too is I will share my phone number with community members, my cell phone number. I will let them come in and meet with me. I had somebody in here this morning and she said, "You didn't even ask me why you wanted to meet. You just said, 'Yeah, come and talk to me,'" because I know the power of people just being able to share their story. That is the beginning of developing relationships. So that'll be a lot of what we try to lift up and foster and build space for and around as we try to advance the work.
Carrie Fox:
So as we come to the end of this conversation, how in the world did that happen already? George, I'm ready to stay on the phone with you for two more hours at least, but I want to carry forward one more thought I'm hearing from you, which is, we can think about the issues we work on as intractable, as so big they will never be solved. We can also think about what can we do every day to get closer to the story and closer to the storyteller? Because I think that's when relationships start to form, trust starts to build, change starts to happen. I think you and your team are a great example of that, of how you are setting up a new set of norms and standards for what the future of DC could look like.
George Jones:
Absolutely. I should mention to that point, the majority of the people on our governance board actually are patients, they are community members. We have a board meeting every month. Every month I get to hear and hear them and sometimes stories that aren't so easy to hear about different, the disappointments they might have had when they tried to get services from Bread for the City. But having those folks in the room both listening to me and my staff report out about what's happening at Bread and having them tell me about their experiences and what their hopes and dreams are for how Bread will continue to do better job, it is that creating that space for folks to tell their story and to speak their truth to us. So Bread is trying to live out that, so it's why I believe so much in it being critical to us creating those relationships that will help us make the change.
Carrie Fox:
So a parting thought, where can people go to learn more or what do you want to reinforce as folks wrap up this awesome conversation today?
George Jones:
Well, of course, you can always go to Bread for the City's website, wwww.breadforthecity.org. That's the place where you can see Bread's work. We have plenty of articles about the racial justice work we've done, the systems reform work and the direct services work we do. That's the place we're going. We're still in the process of creating and updating our Anti-Racist DC website, and so we're not quite ready for prime time yet with that. But that'll be another space where we're hoping to really have folks to be able to turn to it. What I'll promise people is that ultimately, that link will end up on Bread for the City's website. So they will get a chance to actually to follow the work of the Anti-Racist DC campaign. If they're a DC resident, particularly in leadership, I certainly hope that they'd even consider getting involved in the work.
Carrie Fox:
Well, George, what an awesome honor to connect with you today and learn from you. Thank you for modeling Inclusive Leadership and Brave Leadership as you all are going on such a remarkable and important journey on your own. Thanks for sharing such incredible insights with our listeners today.
George Jones:
Well, thank you. It's my pleasure, and I hope I get a chance to come back and talk to you again about our work.
Carrie Fox:
That sounds like a plan. Thanks, George.
George Jones:
All right.
Carrie Fox:
That brings us to the end of this episode of The Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you are stewing on what we discussed here today, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners and let me know what's got you thinking. If you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too. Mission Forward is produced with the support of Sadie Lockhart in association with the True Story Team. Engineering by Pete Wright. If your podcast app allows for ratings and reviews, I hope you will consider doing just that for this show. But the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or colleague. Thanks for your support, and we'll see you next time.
