We can’t achieve social justice in America until we build friendships, understanding, and empathy across racial lines.
Our Youth Leadership Program is where we begin.
Our mission is to advance the national dialogue on race, alleviate educational and residential segregation, and inspire individuals to take actions that further racial healing and social justice.
Jimiri is a social justice nonprofit that promotes cross-racial friendships and leadership training for middle-school and high-school students.
To help address the socio-economic disparities of segregation, we bring students together in small, racially diverse groups to build friendship, empathy, and understanding across racial lines.
Middle-school students gather on Sunday afternoons, engaging in social justice curricula and common-interest activities led by high-school and college facilitators who previously completed the program.
In this way, from middle school through college, our young Jimiri leaders build lifelong, cross-racial friendships that will serve as the foundation for the next generation of social justice leadership.
“Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. And so the ability of [Black Americans] and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found readymade; it must be created by the fact of contact.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Where Do We Go From Here
(Beacon Press 1968), at p. 28.
