Strategic Focus:
2023 Policy Empowerment Goals
Black LGBTQ+/SGL Americans represent a significant subset of Black families with 3.7 percent of all Black Americans (more than one million people) identifying as LGBTQ+/SGL (Williams Institute; 2013). The challenges facing the community are compounded, in part, by the stigma and marginalization that attend social constructions of race, normative gender, and sexuality. In an effort to empower Black LGBTQ+/SGL people and their families, NBJC prioritized three policy pillars in 2023:
Ensuring that ALL Black Lives Matter
As civil rights, racial equity, and criminal justice transformations take center stage in the new Congress and Biden/Harris administration, NBJC is prioritizing legislation that applies an LGBTQ+/SGL-inclusive intersectional lens to ensure that ALL Black lives are centered in what becomes law and that we support the shifts in practice required to honor that all of our lives matter, in theory and in praxis.
Co-Creating a Nation Where We ALL can THRIVE
Our education and healthcare systems have failed too many of us. To build a nation where all of us can thrive, we must create and enforce policies that prioritize holistic health and well-being while investing in learning and development opportunities that center and celebrate our beautifully diverse community. This includes the democratized deployment of resources and support.
Repairing and Healing a Divided Nation
Our nation was built upon, and continues to profit from, the unpaid and under-compensated labor of Black people. This current moment in the global movement for Black lives presents the United States with an important opportunity to be accountable for racial healing and to make the investments necessary to redress historical and present-day harms. These harms include wage and land theft, environmental poisoning, unfair sentencing where years with loved ones can never be returned, and loved ones lost to HIV/AIDS when the government chose to ignore an enduring pandemic.
Call to Action:
To build the people power needed to turn these policies from ideas into law, we need YOU to own YOUR power. Our collective power can change our nation and the opportunities for our communities for generations to come, but it requires organizing and sustained advocacy.
