Last night I stayed up late and joined a Zoom call at 10 pm Eastern Time sponsored by the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center in Seattle. The theme for this social justice “cafe” was “white privilege.”

I love to see what other nonprofits are doing to promote racial and social justice, and more importantly, how they foster discussion on important topics.

So, I picked this Zoom, in part, because the facilitator is the sister of the matriarch of The Velez Family, dear dear friends of mine. It’s so amazing to attend an event where you know the people running it have something impactful to say and come from a diverse background.

And I got to socialize with folks from the West Coast!

The really, really neat part of this discussion wasn’t the fact that it covered a very important topic—oh no! The wonderful part of this discussion is that the host organization has designed the materials as a “kit” to allow meaningful conversations that can be reproduced among various groups.

The reflections, questions and materials promote open dialogue of various perspectives and hopefully will challenge the participants to have a better understanding of how race-based privilege, unintentional/ socially ingrained bias and ancient laws/codes all still exist and prevent society from truly “moving on” or working together.

I encourage you if you need resources to launch discussions of social justice, explore this nonprofit’s web site: International Peace & Justice Center. They are a faith-based group, but they recognize that everyone has a different spirituality.

Their web site opens with calling racism a sin. And even though I am not a Christian, I will be the first to agree that racism is a sin. Especially now. It’s 2020. Humanity should be ashamed at how we treat one another.