This past week has ripped open and laid bare immense pain and outrage in our communities. As the United States surpassed a staggering 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, cries for justice rang out nationwide following the brutal killings of Black people by police.

Here in Brooklyn—home to the largest Black community in North America—tens of thousands of activists have taken to our streets to demand an end to the same conditions that have both led Black Brooklynites to die from COVID-19 at twice the rate of whites and taken the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and so many more.

At Brooklyn Community Foundation, we add our voices to this cry for action. We must interrogate, dismantle, and reimagine every system in our society that sanctions and perpetuates oppression, injustice, and the deaths of Black people.

Black Lives Matter. And none of us can afford to stay silent. 

Six years ago, we began the work of making Brooklyn Community Foundation an anti-racist institution, knowing that this is the only pathway to realizing our vision for a fair and just Brooklyn.

Core to this commitment is being vocal and explicit about race, addressing not only disparate outcomes but also the systems that create them, centering the voices of directly impacted communities, and investing in organizations led by Black people and other people of color.

From the start, our Brooklyn COVID-19 Response Fund has followed these principles, and your support has been invaluable to getting resources where they are needed most, with over $3M raised for grassroots community organizations to date. 

We know that this pandemic will eventually come to an end, but we also know that unless we address racism and injustice, Black and Brown communities will continue to be harmed. 

That is why we are focusing the next phase of our Brooklyn COVID-19 Response Fund on engaging with communities of color to envision a new way forward. There is no option of returning “back to normal.” 

We must all—individually and collectively—take action for racial justice like never before.

Read more about our commitment to racial justice in our May 20th 
New York Daily News op-ed:

And follow us on Instagram for valuable resources from our grantee partners like Good Call NYC: