Creating a Radically Inclusive City with Jerry Hawkins
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About the speaker
Imagine a Dallas where no North and South divisions exist in terms of race, wealth, arts, culture, health, safety, education and opportunity, and communities actively, honestly and openly acknowledge, repair, and heal from its past and present racial inequities.
Jerry Hawkins is the Executive Director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (DTRHT), part of a national 14-place initiative by The W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Dallas TRHT's mission is to create a radically inclusive city by addressing
race and racism through narrative change, relationship building, and equitable policies and practices. Jerry is also a co-founder of The Imagining Freedom Institute (The IF
Institute), a national research-based leadership group that helps organizations and institutions understand the historical context to contemporary issues of place, race and racism, and co-principle of Young Leaders Strong City, a program for high school students that creates teen equity summits and councils to explore their experiences and identities. Jerry was formerly the Project Director of Bachman Lake Together for The
Dallas Foundation and Zero To Five Funders Collaborative, an early childhood collective impact initiative in Dallas, and Director of Children Services at the Wilkinson Center in East Dallas/Southeast Dallas.
Jerry is a current 2020-21 Presidential Leadership Scholar, a recent Leadership Arts Institute Fellow with the Business Council for the Arts, a Dallas County Historical Commission Member, and sits on Dallas ISD’s Trustee-appointed Racial Equity Advisory Council and The Education Trust/ERS Resource Equity Working Group for Dallas ISD, and the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas/PolicyLink/National Fund for Workforce Solutions Pathways to Work Workforce Equity Advisory Council. Jerry also serves on the boards of Leadership ISD, Deep Vellum Books, AccessH2O and Teaching Trust. Jerry has been awarded KERA/PBS American Graduate Champion in
2017, an Outstanding Child Advocate at CHILDREN AT RISK’s Texas Academy Awards of Child Advocacy in 2020, and was selected as one of the “Dallas 500 Most Powerful Business Leaders in North Texas” in 2021 by D CEO/D Magazine. Jerry’s first editorial offering, A People’s History of Dallas, will be published in early 2022 by Deep Vellum Books. While living in Chicago, Jerry worked for Chicago Urban League and
Chicago Public Schools. Jerry and his three children, aged 19, 17 and 12, live in Dallas, TX.
Local partners
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Additional details
Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) is a community-driven vehicle for change to transform the community and eventually the country. The TRHT approach examines how the hierarchy of human value became embedded in our society, both its culture and structures, and then works with communities to design and implement effective actions that will permanently uproot it.
In 2019, TRHT released A New Community Vision to share the unwritten and unspoken origin stories of Dallas, and to be led by the communities’ shared vision of a Dallas without racism.
