Black Leadership and Shared Humanity

We offer an in-depth look at how a Black-led nonprofit, Life Pieces To Masterpieces (Washington, DC), stepped up to the challenges of 2020 – the devastation of the pandemic and of yet another wave of anti- Black violence. We place this story alongside scholarship about democratic education and the value of generative reciprocal relationships. While much of the scholarship focuses on university- community partnerships, we extend the analysis to look at the broader networks of relationships that nonprofits like LPTM cultivate. We argue that in the journey to equity and shared humanity, concepts like generative and transformative relationships need to account for the tremendous weight of systemic racism; this can be accomplished by explicitly centering the experiences and epistemology of Black communities. We show how these concepts were deployed and extended in LPTM’s activities from March–July 2020.