History Matters

Ms. Jackie has deep roots in Sacramento, and these roots have shaped her understanding of leadership and social change. She begins by proudly telling me, “I was born and raised here in Sacramento.” Ms. Jackie grew up in the Del Paso Heights neighborhood and emphasizes that it was a “community village.” Much of Ms. Jackie’s work now revolves around reclaiming and rebuilding this sense of a village. And even though she has spent the latter part of her professional career working in Meadowview, her most profound life lessons came from the homegrown “village of elders” that nurtured her development as an adolescent. “That was in the 70s with bell bottoms and platform shoes,” she tells me as she flashes a wide smile, winks, and seems to know she doesn’t quite look her age. Then, rather abruptly, her facial expression changes, and her posture straightens when I ask about some of her most influential mentors. In the community that raised her, one man stands out: Mr. Echols.

Mr. Echols was the custodian at Grant High School, “a gentleman that only had a sixth-grade education.” He was originally from the South and had a distinct southern accent. “He would always talk very slow but the words that he would leave you with would be so profound.” When Ms. Jackie was in high school, she could always turn to Mr. Echols for advice. Even as an adult, he continued to encourage her to get involved in the community.

She quickly provides an example. Years ago, when her son’s Little League team was in turmoil, Mr. Echols told her to join its board. Following his advice, Ms. Jackie became vice president at a time when it was “pretty much male dominated. I thought my interest was just my son at the time,” she remembers, “but it wasn’t really just my son—it was all those kids. It was hundreds of kids that were part of that ’cause sports is a big deal in Del Paso Heights.” Ms. Jackie helped the league become financially solvent and better organized. And then right when she was contemplating leaving the board because it was “pretty stable” and she wanted to “kinda just play a mother’s role,” Mr. Echols told her, quite frankly, “It’s not time for you to do that.” Again, he played a pivotal role, convincing her to coach her son’s senior league team. She laughs as she remembers his directive: “You gotta go coach.” Ms. Jackie pushed back and told him, “I don’t know nothing about baseball.” But he was insistent: “You sat on the benches long enough. You know a little bit about, you know, baseball.” After some trepidation, Ms. Jackie recalls, “I became the coach.” Mr. Echols had that way of making an impact. When Ms. Jackie stepped into that role of baseball coach, it “really opened the door up for a lot of women in Del Paso Heights to [gain] leadership roles that were male dominated.”

This example provides a glimpse into the ways she was mentored, sometimes with a little tough love and nudging. Mr. Echols shaped Ms. Jackie’s trajectory of service, but he was not the only one. She speaks seriously about the ways adults surrounded her with an ethic of care, critical consciousness, and consistency. When asked what exactly this village taught her, she precisely narrows it down to four components: “The first thing they taught me is to watch and listen to them. You needed to sit at the table, really hear what they were saying, how they were saying it, and what was being said. I think there’s a lot to be said for just sitting back and watching someone.”

Second, at a relatively young age, Ms. Jackie accompanied community leaders to neighborhood association meetings and city council convenings. In these spaces, she learned a valuable second lesson: “watching them come to those meetings very organized, very systematically, with an agenda of items that they wanted to see changed or they wanted to make sure that the entire community was informed about.”

The third component she learned is to be “really intentional about this work.” She repeats, “Really being intentional. Being intentional about picking your battles and not getting caught up in the small stuff that wasn’t going to be impactful. And so, I learned that from them.”

Finally, Ms. Jackie witnessed the ways the adults in her life interacted and had very “strong relationships with the community.” She explains that “relationship building” is paramount, especially with families who have been systematically disenfranchised. To disrupt cycles of hopelessness and marginalization, genuine trust must be forged. That is the only way “they [will] feel comfortable that you are their advocate” and “that you are going to serve them.”

Growing up in Del Paso Heights, Ms. Jackie was taught about the importance of observation, discernment, intentionality, and activism. These are cornerstones of her lifelong work, and she remains a consistent force for change throughout Sacramento because of them.

Intergenerational Justice

For the last thirty years, Ms. Jackie has been supporting families in South Sacramento. In the late 1990s, she worked for a development agency that was managing an infamous apartment complex called by many names: G-Parkway, Jean Parkway, Franklin Villa, or Phoenix Park. Although that area has since improved “one family at a time” by making sure people are “connected to social services,” other pockets of Sacramento are still painfully marginalized. She brings up Providence Place Apartments in the Valley High area where she is currently working to disrupt those “same patterns of poverty. Same patterns of hopelessness. Same patterns of crime. We have a model that we used in Phoenix Park,” she explains, “where it doesn’t have to be that way.” She is adamant: “We must make sure that we serve those people in a way that is gonna be supportive of them in a very dignified way.”

The word “dignified” creates a pause between us. Ms. Jackie has discovered that many people who work with the most disenfranchised populations provide a horrifically low quality of services—and get away with it. She explains that families do have challenges, but it’s “still my job to make sure that I service them at the highest level.” This is something Ms. Jackie is known for throughout Sacramento, and people often tell her, “I know you don’t do no junk.”

“The dignity that people come to the table with,” she asserts, “gets lost in the traditional service delivery model.” “These institutions”—she shakes her head as she provides an example—“where you have to sit out in the lobby for two or three hours at a time with four or five kids just waiting for an appointment.” The institutional apparatus foresakes the humanity and it “don’t work.” Even services delivered with the best intentions can strip people of their dignity. And then, logically, folks do not want to come back. “So who loses in that?” Ms. Jackie asks rhetorically. “The babies I love so dearly lose in that” because of the lack of common decency and basic respect.

As an alternative, Ms. Jackie’s approach centralizes relationships. She creates spaces for a connection to unfold where “barriers are broken” and people are “basically pouring out to you things that they wouldn’t be able to tell someone else.” Along this journey, Ms. Jackie and her team tries to show—rather than tell—families how to navigate these bureaucracies. “We are by their side navigating these institutions. Going in there with them.” Again, Ms. Jackie brings it back to “what my elders did for me” when they brought her to the table and led by example.

As I have written about elsewhere, a pedagogy of commitment provides stability and consistency that families can depend on (Watson 2012). Ms. Jackie echoes this point: “When I’m out here in the community or they walk in here, they say, ‘You’re still here!’ ” She elaborates, “I think that one of the things that a lot of the young people I have crossed paths with will tell me is, ‘The only thing I can feel good about Ms. Jackie is that you are still here and you are constant.’ ” Ms. Jackie leans forward and looks down at her folded hands resting on the table between us. She begins to shake her head as she looks up and talks about the “abandonment issues that a lot of our young people and families go through.” That is why it is imperative to have “consistency” and “somebody that they can always go to.” She repeats, “It’s very, very important.”

Unfortunately, Ms. Jackie laments, “We don’t have a lot of those consistent people that stay around for decades that are going to be there for the people that are the most vulnerable.” Perhaps some people burn out or relocate, or a new reform emerges, or funding streams change course: whatever the reason, there is a lot of transience. For families who are surviving through various instabilities, impermanence can be devastating. It makes sense, then, that an important component of Ms. Jackie’s effectiveness is her lifelong commitment to Black children and families in Sacramento. For Ms. Jackie, the seed of social change is the development of reliable, respectful, revolutionary relationships.

She grins with joy as she says, “We were just at the baby shower this weekend.” Ms. Jackie refers to the intergenerational impact that occurs by doing the same kind of work, over time, in the same location. Place matters. “Most of those mothers” at the baby shower used to be “a lot of my young people.” Ms. Jackie was able to “touch their lives,” and they are still a part of her extended family. She laughs under her breath: “They were swarming us like bees on Saturday!” During this celebration, Ms. Jackie was consistent with her mentoring and counseled the new mom on the “importance of loving this baby like I love them.”

Engage My People

“You have to love what you do. You have to love the people you serve,” exclaims Ms. Jackie, who is skeptical that love is a trainable attribute. As with authenticity, it needs to be integral to a person’s walk in the world. Quite frankly, the only people who fully and completely know about the Black experience are Black people. But she is realistic that it takes all kinds of people to improve a community. Ms. Jackie’s pragmatism comes forward just as she leans toward me: “All those kind of things to really be authentic in the delivery of anything” from meetings with child care to meals that show you genuinely care and see the fullness of someone. I nod and agree, “It’s holistic and wholesome.” “Exactly,” and Ms. Jackie continues. The “underserved population has already gone through enough! And they don’t need someone that is gonna take them through more!”

Unlike some service providers, Ms. Jackie explains, “We’re not just giving them a bus pass and leave them. If you need a bus pass, there is some other stuff going on. We need to sit down and really open up a case and open up this Pandora’s box and figure out what else is going on.” Ms. Jackie and her staff provide hands-on wraparound care and intensive case management with the goal of families becoming “stable enough to stand on their own.” The work is not easy, and it is more than full time. The current caseload of RFCE is “about 44 and growing.”

After three decades of serving Black families, Ms. Jackie seems like an expert. Hearing this observation, she chuckles a bit and describes what she was like when she first started working in the projects back when it was called Franklin Villa. By day it looked calm and quiet, but by nighttime it was like “New Jack City.” During this time, Ms. Jackie was working for a housing corporation: “I was the only African American at the time that worked in this department … Of course, they’re gonna send the Black girl to Jean Parkway.”

“Now I’m Black,” Ms. Jackie states, and “most of the community was Black.” But she later realized, “I didn’t know anything!” She shakes her head and folds her arms: the families would not engage with her at all. Ms. Jackie doesn’t like to fail and wanted to be an advocate, but she did not know how to build the trust necessary to get the work done. “I went home and I prayed on it.… I’m not giving up on this one. There [has] got to be a way to engage my people.” She started anew and left the adults alone. “I’m going to start with the kids,” she decided. Ms. Jackie started a “little afterschool program” in “one of the four-plex units,” and ten kids showed up. After some time passed and the program started to grow, she asked the children, “Why do your parents not want to talk with me?” The babies were clear as day and told her bluntly: “They think you’re the police.”

Again, Ms. Jackie had to reevaluate her strategy: “I had system written on my face.… I was going out there in my little suits and my heels, and all of this stuff.” To gain the trust of the neighborhood, she literally gave herself a makeover and toned it all down. “I went and got me some colors” and “some jeans.” Essentially, she humbled herself to the tone of the community, and families started to talk to her. “And they would tell me, “We thought you were Po Po. We didn’t know you were here to help us.” Slowly a partnership began to be forged from everyone’s love for the children. “The gang bangers would send their kids over” and would share with Ms. Jackie that “even though I’m out here in the streets, I want my kids to get an education”; in exchange for this support, “we’ll protect the place where you provide the afterschool program.” She explains that they literally had “this handshake deal” that anywhere the “kids did activities was off-limits.” From that point on, the center began to thrive. Over the years, she worked with nearly one hundred kids, and they defied the stereotypes (“bottom of the barrel not doing anything successful”) and are now college educated. She is especially proud that many of them went “off to college and came back to the community. My dream for them is to always come back and serve.… Because who knows your community better than you?” Ms. Jackie repeats, “I need you to come back and serve.”

Collective Action

After decades of working with the housing authority, Ms. Jackie had her eyes on retirement. “I had done my thirty years, I was ready to retire,” she says with a smirk. “It was time to go and then” something unexpected happened: “I was sitting in Phoenix Park” and felt something stir deep inside that said, “You are not finished.”

“So I started my own 501(c)(3),” which is now the thriving Rose Family Creative Empowerment Center. She has been steadily expanding the service model over the last six years, with a tremendous amount of support from the Sierra Health Foundation and BCLC. She explains that BCLC has connected her to systems change and neighborhood networks in a whole new way: it provided Ms. Jackie and her colleagues the opportunity to join forces across the region and strategically advocate for the needs of the African American community, alongside its members. She asserts that the system needed to be held accountable, and BCLC became a tool to “vet these folks” who are mandated to improve the quality of life for poor folks and who are disproportionately African American. She cites Child Protective Services (CPS) as an example: its staff often “hold families’ feet to the fire” with deliverables so that they can keep or regain custody of their children. With the help of BCLC, Ms. Jackie and others created checkpoints to monitor CPS staff’s cultural competencies and are using cultural brokers to foster bridges between families and social workers. Now when a case is referred to CPS, its staff are culturally sensitive. “Parents are being accountable to certain deliverables,” says Ms. Jackie, but her job is to also hold the system’s “feet to the fire.” In other words, deliverables should not be one-directional; they need to be reciprocal.

Over the years, BCLC has helped develop a vital partnership between community members and social services. Relationships have improved. She explains, “The Black Child Legacy Campaign has given us the latitude to actually present and produce this kind of model where we are “working with CPS, working with DHA, working with Probation, working with the police department, working with SETA (Sacramento Employment & Training Administration)” so that Black children in this city survive and thrive.

Dynamic social services and innovative institutional practices are fundamental to equity, and yet these systems alone cannot solve every problem. Even at the grassroots level, critical reflection is needed for healthy development and growth. Ms. Jackie brings up a space for intentional improvements. She reflects, once again, on the powerful village that raised her and surmises, “I had that balance.” I ask what she means. Ms. Jackie worries that there is an unevenness right now and that it takes both male and female leadership to nourish a thriving neighborhood. She is forthright in her critiques: “There is not that balance anymore in our communities. It’s pretty much female-dominated. And females are always in these males’ ears trying to tell them what to do.” Ms. Jackie yearns for harmonious, collective accountability—and it starts with how we reflect on our own identities while simultaneously elevating one another. She is straight to the point: “So anytime I get a chance at bringing a male and raising up these young males to become the leaders of these young men it’s very, very important for me to do that” because “I can’t teach manhood.”

Black Childhood Is Precious

We started our conversation with the past, and here we are, again, looking backward. Ms. Jackie’s earliest memory of racism stems from elementary school when she was in the second grade. The school she attended was predominantly white, and she was “always singled out” with “racial slurs.” Her expression is stoic and unbothered as she tells me, “They would basically use the n-word quite often.” These experiences inside school were drastically different from those in the community that raised her. In a soft tone that soothes the soul, she utters slowly, “Black childhood is precious.”

“It’s always at the top of my agenda” to ensure that “Black children know their greatness through the past, but for others to know our greatness too because people can’t see the greatness in you unless they know your history.” Without a knowledge of African civilizations and ongoing legacies of liberation, she says, “How are we gonna feel great? How are we gonna resonate in that greatness if we don’t know it? And oftentimes our kids don’t know it. They absolutely don’t know.”

The Black Child Legacy Campaign presents a bolder horizon for the city of Sacramento. On this horizon, BCLC is rising with people like Ms. Jackie Rose who are holding Black children at the center—like the sun. These children’s lives are the peak of a city’s quest for progress, a community’s need for partnerships, and a people’s continued perseverance.

Black people build worlds within worlds. They always have. These alternative spaces exemplify life and liberation, joy and justice. The struggle for Black excellence and equity is real and can be cruel, yet there is beauty in the fight. There is profound purpose in Black power. In our final moments together, I provide Ms. Jackie with some prompts. Her answers pour out poetically like a future calling itself forward:

Black power … feels free.

Freedom to me … sounds like a Marvin Gaye song.

When I look into our past … I see nothing but greatness.

When I look in the mirror … I see nothing but beauty.

When I look into our future … I see hope.

I am fighting against … a system that doesn’t include us.

I’m fighting to … dismantle the system.

I’m building … a legacy of leaders who will carry out my vision.

I love … what I do.