Nemours opens full-time office for children in Panama City with St. Joe Foundation grant

credit: c/o Columbus Coalition for the Homeless file photos via CrowdRise

"When I moved to rural North Carolina to teach high school, a blindfold was finally ripped off," Vichi Jagannathan tells Quartz.

"This was the onset of my journey to realizing that, even as a first-generation person of color, I benefit from and am complicit in upholding unjust systems."

Jagannathan is the co-founder of the Rural Opportunity Institute, a not-for-profit in Edgecombe County, NC.

Its mission is "to turn wisdom and the newest science into common practice" by helping communities heal from trauma, she tells Quartz.

"People are not to blame for the trauma that they experience," she says.

"There is so much wisdom and experience already present in our communities and our histories."

Jagannathan, who grew up in India, attended three Ivy League universities but never learned about the "injustice of racialized trauma still perpetuated by institutions, including schools, through policies and practices steeped in white supremacy," she says.

After moving to rural North Carolina to teach high school, "I have been on a quest for truth and justice," she says.

"I helped found ROI to connect the privilege, knowledge, and resources I hold with rural communities whose stories are often told by others in ways that hide their power and

Read the Entire Article