The University of South Carolina hosted Equity Summit 2018, which brought together community and academic leaders to discuss race equity and inclusion over two days. Neil White, who tells the stories of Children’s Trust, covered the event.
Janice Probst and Saundra Glover takes questions after their keynote presentation at the Equity Summit.
Saundra Glover completely understands why conversations on race and reconciliation must take place when it comes to creating equity for all children in South Carolina.
A distinguished professor emerita in the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health, Glover delivered one of the keynote sessions along with her colleague and fellow professor emerita Janice Probst at the Equity Summit 2018 on the USC campus in early November.
Glover pointed out that communities across this state can’t move forward until there is equal access to health care, education and housing for all children, which starts with an honest dialogue about where they’ve been in order to get to where they need to be.
Melissa Strompolis, director of research and evaluation at Children’s Trust, seconded that.
“As Americans, we value opportunity, especially for children. With a focus on race equity, we can ensure that all kids in South Carolina have the opportunity to live their best life,” Strompolis said. “Children in South Carolina deserve our collective care, and as adults, it is our job to ensure they have what they need to be successful.”
Children’s Trust, as the state’s KIDS COUNT grantee, published updated race and ethnicity profiles in 2017. The organization, which is the statewide leader in the prevention of child abuse, neglect and injury, served as a co-sponsor of the summit along with the South Carolina Collaborative for Race and Reconciliation, the South Carolina Race Equity and Inclusion Collaborative, the Arnold School of Public Health, and the Center for Civil Rights History and Research.
Jennifer Gunter introduces the panel discussion about equity initiatives at universities.
The Equity Summit brought together leaders from different fields on the campus setting, where they could exchange information and strategies on making a commitment to equity and inclusion in their workplaces and their work.
When children are born into conditions where resources are lacking, where they can’t get a healthy start to life, where they experience stressors at home, and where the schools fail to develop their potential, they struggle to thrive. These barriers can disproportionately affect children of color.
Research also shows that children of different races and ethnicities sometimes experience more adverse childhood experiences – those traumatic events that can lead to poor health and social outcomes later in life.
“To prevent abuse in the future, we have to talk about abuse that has occurred,” Glover said. “Too often, particularly in rural families and particularly minority families, it’s not talked about, it’s not discussed, it’s not an issue, so individuals grow up with these issues that are kind of hanging on and in their mind. That prevents them from developing into the people that they can be, the strong individuals that they can be.”
Finding Common Ground on Moving Forward
The broader discussion at the two-day summit included an opening keynote speech by Susan Glisson, the co-founder and co-director of Sustainable Equity, as well as the keynote by Glover and Probst on the second day.
“A lot of the inequities that we see in our society today originated as raced-based equities and lingered because they are associated,” Probst said.
Attendees at the Equity Summit listen to one of the panel discussions at the Russell House Theater.
A pair of panel discussions – one on equity initiatives at universities and the other on initiatives in communities – in the Russell House Theater allowed attendees to converse with a wide variety of academic and community leaders on the difficult topic of race. Jennifer Gunter, director of the S.C. Collaborative on Race and Reconciliation, organized the summit that brought them together.
“We’re all trying to get to the same place, we’re just taking different cars,” Gunter said.
Glover called the community conversations a key element if all children are going to receive the same opportunity to succeed. Participants stated any discomfort in having conversations about race was worth it if people were willing to work together to find solutions that can make South Carolina a place where equal access is available across geographic and demographic boundaries.
“It’s critical. That’s the next generation,” Glover said. “If we’re going to move forward in our state, in communities, and, in general, in the nation, then we’ve got to invest in our children. That’s our future, and to do it means that we’ve got to provide the resources. … That’s what we can do as it relates to focusing on our children and ensuring that they have the future that they should have.”
