Tacoma Public Schools recently honored the Institute for Community Leadership (ICL) with their Gold Star Community Partner Award for the work they do with youth teaching them skills in the areas of leadership and civic engagement.
Click here for the article on the Seattle Medium website
Tacoma Public Schools Partnership office works to galvanize the power of community to assist young people in creating the future they choose, plan, and prepare for. We bring people together to become the voices that young people listen to and believe that say: you can achieve, you will graduate, and we are here to help you.
Click here for the article on the Tacoma Public Schools website
At its April 28 meeting, the Tacoma Public Schools Board of Directors presented its Gold Star Community Partner Award to the Institute for Community Leadership, a 25-year-old community-based agency providing ethical leadership, nonviolence and civic engagement learning to students.
Director of Tacoma Public Schools Community Partnerships Amanda Scott-Thomas presented the Gold Star to a diverse group of students, parents, staff and teachers from the Institute.
Click here for the article on the Tacoma Weekly website
In 1998, 11 members of Congress followed Congressman John Lewis on a tour of Alabama’s major civil rights sites in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma. They visited places like the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where on Sept. 15, 1963, a bomb killed 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Denise McNair, while they were attending Sunday School.
The Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage has been an annual event ever since that inaugural tour, and it includes a procession across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. This was where, on March 7, 1965, civil rights marchers, including Lewis, suffered brutal beatings on that “Bloody Sunday” for demanding African American voting rights.
Lewis passed away on July 17, 2020, but his legacy lives on in the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage. This year was the first that it happened without Lewis there in person (COVID caused the pilgrimage to go virtual in 2021), and his absence was felt and mourned. But there was joy as well in the form of 17 teenagers who got to go along with the official bi-partisan congressional delegation. Lincoln High School sophomore and youth leader Ashaia Bennett was among them, the first Black high-schooler from Tacoma to attend the pilgrimage.
Click here for the article on the Tacoma Weekly website