America’s Path Forward: Conversations with Social Innovators on the Power of Communities Everywhere
Konstanze Frischen & Michael Zakaras, Editors
280 pages, Georgetown University Press, 2023
The United States is living through a period of polarization and upheaval. We hunger for answers, yet too often turn to the same people and institutions, expecting different outcomes. How can this be? America’s Path Forward: Conversations with Social Innovators on the Power of Communities Everywhere takes a different angle. It features award-winning social innovators from all walks of life with decades of experience of working in and with their communities across America. In 22 deep, idea-packed conversations, they share their analyses, practical insights, and policy recommendations—on how to gain common ground, get the country unstuck, and increase prosperity and well-being for all.
In the excerpt from the book that follows, an interview with T. Morgan Dixon, Dixon taps into the changemaking potential of Black women, while addressing the exhaustion, isolation, trauma, and oppression they experience. As the cofounder of GirlTrek, the largest health organization for Black women in America with nearly 1.5 million members as of June 2021, Dixon is fueling a movement that instead prioritizes joy, health, and self-determination. She encourages women to see walking as a practical first step toward healthy living and strong families and communities. As women organize walking teams, they mobilize community members to support advocacy efforts and lead a civil rights–inspired health movement. GirlTrek’s members also support local and national policy to encourage physical activity, improve access to safe places to walk, protect and reclaim green spaces, and improve the walkability and built environments of communities across the United States.
This conversation is about culture change, Black history, the power of self-care, and the radical approach to fighting hatred with hope and love.—Konstanze Frischen and Michael Zakaras
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Morgan, you co-lead the largest health movement of Black women in America, now a community of over a million and a half women across the country. What does health mean to you and your community?
In some ways, it’s a hard question, a layered question. First and foremost, health for Black women in America means not dying. I mean that. Eight out of ten of us are over a healthy weight, and we’re dying years, sometimes decades, before we should from preventable diseases like stroke, heart disease, diabetes. The disparities are devastating and have a ripple effect across our families and communities.
On the TED stage in 2017 you said, “The trauma of systemic racism is killing Black women.” Why is this happening?
In GirlTrek, we listened to our members, studied the root causes, and created a framework to better understand this question. We call that frame “The Three Deadly I’s.” Inactivity is the first; it’s easiest to see and solve for. Moving your body for thirty minutes every day is the single, most powerful health intervention we can do. But when I read statistics like, “Seventy-eight percent of Black women are inactive during leisure time,” the question for me is not “Why are Black women inactive?” It’s, “What is leisure time?” Most Black women in America don’t have leisure time. And that’s a labor issue. Black women are busy. Black women are exhausted. Black women are often the sole provider for their families because of systems designed to make it so.
The second “I” is isolation. Research shows that loneliness is deadlier than cigarette smoking. Everyone got a tiny taste of this during COVID. Black women have been isolated for lots of reasons, from zoning and being way out in the suburbs because we can no longer afford to live in our communities—like my mom, who’s living an hour away from my sister because there’s no affordable housing closer—to things like the prison industrial complex, which has taken away one in three Black men. Or the subsequent policy that, when your man comes home, doesn’t allow him to live in your home if you are in subsidized housing. Those sorts of things have led to isolation.
Last is injustice. Twenty-three percent of Black people in America live in poverty, under the poverty line. We’re talking about slave wages for people who are restaurant workers or caregivers. Injustice also includes toxic runoff in our communities that are too often dumped on. Some are dealing with infrastructure issues that stem from century-old policies that deprioritized investment in Black communities. One of our Trekkers in Denver, she’s in a community dealing with toxic runoff. Residents call it “The Swamp.” With advocacy training through GirlTrek, in partnership with Stanford University, our member called the city engineers, and they said, “It’s a misrouted pipe. It’s been there for forty years.” So injustice is real. It’s not just in Flint, Michigan, although it still persists there. It’s all over. These kinds of unfair shakes, especially when they are compounded, are deadly.
These things seem overwhelming. When you look ahead, what are you seeing?
These things are overwhelming. And yet, we see a way forward. It’s through collective organizing, the only thing that has shifted culture in the four hundred years that my people have been in America. We’ve discovered that for us, for Black women, the most seditious acts are actually acts of radical self-care. So we teach women: Give yourself permission to take up space, stop bowing down to oppression, prioritize your health, stop asking permission to show up for the people you care about. It’s saying, “Yeah, I’m going to go for a walk at lunch.” Or “I’m going to take a sabbatical for myself,” like the whole GirlTrek team does every year. All of those things together, they allow Black women to live. And if we can eliminate the barriers to health and the systems designed to kill us, we will see the vibrance, bounce-back, and joy that Black women have in abundance—the qualitative side of health.
On that point, in the last year especially, GirlTrek has seen explosive growth in membership. What opportunities for change does this open up?
So we started with two people in 2010—my college friend and cofounder, Vanessa Garrison, and me. And on November 18, 2020, we inspired the millionth Black woman to join other Black women—to hope together, open their front doors together, step out in faith together, walk in the footsteps of our foremothers who fought for a better world for their daughters and granddaughters. As of June 2021, we are 1.5 million strong. And that’s a big deal. That’s 8 percent of Black women in America. That makes us finally big enough to effect policy change. We can start to change zoning for corporate pollution, talk to the Food and Drug Administration about how food is sourced at our kids’ schools, or even insist on increases in federal minimum wage. And together, we can create new economies and capital markets in Black communities around wellness. This will be the work of the next ten years, and we’re excited about it.
But I can also tell you that our members are not waiting for us to come up with some kind of elegant plan. They’re not. They never have. They are doing all sorts of things, every day, to make their communities better, stronger, more beautiful, safer. They are showing that when Black women walk, things change.
An example?
There are hundreds of examples. And because we encourage sharing on Facebook and Instagram, we get to see and celebrate successes across the GirlTrek community. So just the other day on Instagram, I saw that a GirlTrekker posted a photo of a mural in her neighborhood that she passed on her walk. She tagged the artist, thanked her for beautifying the community, and said that GirlTrek will take care of the street around it. In Atlanta, a whole group of women reclaimed green space. It was a gazillion of them, safely taking care of the trails, leaving no trace, diversifying the parks. We do this in city parks, state parks, regional parks, and national parks. Then in Seattle, a woman launched a search committee for a missing child, the son of a fellow GirlTrekker, and literally just fanned out throughout the streets to find this child after the police had given up on the case. And they found him. So these are a few examples.
They leave me wondering often: What would have happened if groups of women had been walking on Ma’Khia Bryant’s block the day the sixteen-year-old girl was killed by police? Walking groups like the ones we’re seeing, with this much determination and heart—they are showing how to keep us safe and healthy, keep us moving forward on so many levels.
So, in a sense, you are taking health as a hook, as a starting point for a bigger culture change. Does that help with getting funding?
It’s more than a hook, for sure. We need our health; we need to live. But it’s true that health is something that can be measured, and that’s important for funders and policy makers. You valuing me as human? That’s less quantifiable. I mean, if the Civil Rights Movement were applying for funds today, would anyone fund it? I don’t know whether Dr. Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, the people of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the people at the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) would have been able to fight for their lives and dignity while applying for grant funding and filling out quarterly evaluation forms. “Did you get justice or peace this quarter, Dr. King?” Thankfully, they won, so we have some level of dignity, some rights, our lives, and also a blueprint for allies and funders to see what’s possible. And I’m grateful for that because we do need funding. Not bets of $5 million—we’re ready for hundreds of millions because we have an intervention that works.
And by the way, it saves taxpayers money. The lifetime cost of treating obesity via the health care system is, on average, about $13,000 per adult. GirlTrek has our intervention down to $67 per woman. That would require $67 million to move a million women from inactivity to lifesaving habit formation. And that’s not even looking at other effects, like reduced community violence. The future of health care is culture change. And America should invest in proximate leaders with proven track records.
Have you seen the narrative about Black women change over the last couple of years?
Stacey Abrams is following in the footsteps of Fannie Lou Hamer. We’ve always been awesome. Nothing has changed. You’re welcome, America. Ha! Black women are powerful. We’re influential. We are a voting bloc, a huge consumer market. And together, GirlTrek will leverage the power of a million Black women to change systems, to protect the environment, to reform criminal justice, to reimagine food systems. We will be at the forefront of a real revitalization of labor law and thinking about the impact of poverty. But we’re getting paid sixty-one cents to every White man’s dollar. I care more about these issues than how Black women are perceived. I care that Black women are dying disproportionately from maternal health issues that are completely preventable.
The week after George Floyd’s murder, you started Black History Bootcamp, a walk-and-talk podcast that you cohost, where you curate and talk about Black changemakers and history makers whose stories are less well-known or celebrated than they should be. Why was this important to do?
Because our foremothers left a blueprint for changemaking. We needed to remind ourselves that this road ain’t nothing compared to the road we have traveled. That ordinary people like us, being brave alone and working together, have contributed to America in ways that are absolutely critical—from Georgia Gilmore funding the Montgomery bus boycotts with her small business to Richard Allen, the Black founding father, who in addition to starting the AME Church organized citywide frontline responders to save lives all across Philadelphia during a yellow fever epidemic. We were able to have truthful and intimate conversations about important strategies for courage and justice. I also love that our allies can listen in and not take up space, and we didn’t have to perform under any kind of White gaze because it was just me talking to my friend about the people in history, our ancestors who continue to instruct and inspire us. Everyone should listen to Black History Bootcamp.
I’m always interested in sharing the value of my people outside of the labor we provide, because if our value is only connected to our labor, then we will continue to work ourselves to death. So that’s what I do through storytelling—whether it’s just us talking now or if it is us talking on a podcast that a million people download. I think storytelling is powerful enough to change people’s hearts and minds.
There’s another part of storytelling that’s harder. It’s reckoning with history that has been hidden from the history books because it’s violent, ugly, the opposite of democratic ideals—like the Tulsa Race Massacre that marked its one-hundredth anniversary this year. Why is learning these stories important?
So Tulsa, you know, I didn’t know the full story until this year. I was grateful for the History Channel documentary that just came out. We did a whole podcast episode on Tulsa, yet somehow I didn’t take one moment to think about how it fit into my life. And then, after we got off the podcast with Tamika Mallory as our guest, I was overwhelmed. I took the next day off work, I was so sad. And then I realized why: It’s because I know Tulsa. My family’s from around there. I grew up with the red dirt of Oklahoma under my fingernails. I needed to know more.
The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the biggest mass murders of Black people in American history. There were many. Especially in the Red Summer of Hate in 1919. Tulsa is known today because the people there were educated. They ran newspapers; they could tell their own stories. The local papers wrote inflammatory, incendiary articles about the Black population that led to the racial tension and White lynch mobs. So in the legacy of Ida B. Wells, I’m committed to telling our history, talking about difficult social justice issues, telling my own family’s story while I’m alive.
I am all for free speech, but if your free speech is destructive or hateful or poisonous to me, my people, and my children, and stokes fear or continues a legacy of White supremacy, you don’t have the right to that. There is this arc to today that people feel really valid in saying completely false things that are just patently untrue. And tolerance for that is credentialing. It has to stop.
Despite all the killings and deaths that happened in 2020, parallel to the podcast, GirlTrek posted positive stories on social media, stories of self-care, self-love. Why was this important to do?
Because rage will kill you. It has killed us. This brings us back to the start of our conversation. The weight Black women carry on their bodies, it is a protection from violence, an attempt to be invisible in a world designed to kill us. So we fight hatred and rage with hope and love. We do. All last year, we were fighting for our sanity, we were fighting for our rest, we were fighting to keep our cortisol and stress hormone levels from spiking. We had to try and create normalcy in a world that is not normal, and we did this by inviting ordinary women to share their extraordinary testimonies.
And so we leaned into hope, and we leaned into looking to our foremothers for inspiration, for a blueprint, for a manifesto on how to survive times that don’t feel survivable. Twenty twenty was deeply disturbing and violent, and yet still, Donald Trump was no Bull Connor. So we could at least be as strong as our ancestors. We owe that to them. And that context is empowering. It’s like, “We have been here before, and guess what? We survived. And guess what? We will survive. And when we survive, we’re going to be intact, and we’re going to be intact in a way that still allows us to love you.” That’s radical.
It is.
It is.
Based on that resilience you just described, what do you see is next in the movement of Black self-liberation, collective liberation?
You know, we did, I think, a good Black History Bootcamp episode on A. Philip Randolph. I didn’t know that much about him. I knew that he organized the March on Washington—that it wasn’t Dr. King—but he also started the first Black union of Pullman porters, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in the 1920s. These were the men who worked the trains, who manned the biggest transportation movement in the free world. With the union, he was able to negotiate in really powerful ways. He’s also indirectly responsible for the desegregation of the military. Just fascinating. So when I think about what’s ahead, I think about how we can learn a lot from people like A. Philip Randolph, who essentially said, “We control this entire industry. So we can demand respect. And we can shift policy.”
Bringing this back to right now, I believe that people like Vanessa and me, people like the founders of Black Lives Matter, those of us who represent a critical mass of Black people, we really have to be at the policy table. We have to look at things as dry as procurement. We have to study collective bargaining. Learn from living legends in the Civil Rights Movement like Angela Davis, who told us that GirlTrek was the revolution, and Marshall Ganz, who is advising our grassroots strategy. So for anyone reading this: We should be at the table.