Dialing Up the Volume on Economic and Racial Justice Efforts During the Pandemic

Molly Martin and Autumn McDonald wrote for New America's Calamity as Catalyst about how pandemic, and the renewed calls for racial justice, transformed the way we should think about community engagement.

In February 2020, we were on the phone—two moms, colleagues, and friends trying to decide if it was safe to travel. We wondered when the threat of a pandemic would ease enough for us to reschedule an event we’d planned to host in West Virginia—“Working While Black.” At that point, our biggest worry was that not enough people wanted to attend. People didn't seem particularly interested in discussing the experience of a group of people that—as Ralph Ellison notes in Invisible Man—is indeed unseen by those who refuse to see them. This sort of worry wasn’t new; we were in the business of bringing these “invisible experiences” to light before the public and to policymakers. It was never an easy sell.

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