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Word is Bond with Lakayana Drury
43 Plays1 year ago
On today’s episode: Nonprofit founder Lakayana Drury
Drury is the founder and executive director of Word is Bond, a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, and inspired by the obstacles he overcame to discover his life path. He’s an educator, social entrepreneur, community organizer, and storyteller who uses art, poetry and photography to uplift hidden stories to inspire others to collective action.
Topics:
- 02:15 Drury’s journey and finding mentorship
- 07:46 Unpacking the school-to-prison pipeline
- 11:15 Feeling “Black enough” and navigating racial identites
- 15:43 Word as Bond and empowering young Black men
- 22:50 Backlash and “Whitelash” and new Black leaders
For more information on Drury’s nonprofit work, visit mywordisbond.org. If you want to reach out directly to Drury visit lakayanadrury.com.
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Transcript
Black Boy Joy and Potential
00:00:12
Speaker
Support keeps you afloat, but empowerment shoots you off like a rocket.
00:00:18
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And so we harness the soul force that is Black Boy Joy, and we strap like a rocket to the back of these young men's back, and we shoot them into the atmosphere to become whatever it is that they desire to be.
Ed Madison's Learning Strategies
00:00:42
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Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
00:00:50
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I'm your host, Ed Madison.
00:00:51
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I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes,
00:01:05
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and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
Journalistic Learning Initiative
00:01:09
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Teaching students to become effective communicators is at the heart of JLI's work.
Word as Bond and Art's Role
00:01:49
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Lachanana Jury is the founder and executive director of Word as Bond, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit, which is inspired by the obstacles he overcame to discover his own life path.
00:01:59
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He is an educator, a social entrepreneur, community organizer, and storyteller who uses various mediums of art.
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primarily poetry and photography, to uplift hidden stories and inspire others to collective action.
00:02:12
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Welcome to the podcast.
Navigating Biracial Identity
00:02:14
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And I wanted to start, yeah, I wanted to start by just chatting a little bit about your own sort of personal journey and share a little bit about your childhood and your upbringing.
00:02:26
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Yeah, so...
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If you follow black political thought, you're familiar with W.E.B.
00:02:34
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Du Bois, who in the beginning of the 20th century coined the term the color line or the theory of double consciousness, which describes a black person in the United States experience in both the black world and living in the white world and having to see themselves the two of those lenses.
00:02:54
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And I feel like I'm a third
00:03:00
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rendering of that, which is that not only am I in between those two worlds, but because of my biracial identity, I have even another element to that.
Male Identity and Societal Blueprints
00:03:08
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My dad is from South Sudan and grew up there in the in the late 60s and early 70s before coming to the United States, where he met my mom at the University of Minnesota.
00:03:21
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And my mother grew up in Wisconsin.
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So
00:03:24
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the white and black worlds are oftentimes at odds with themselves.
00:03:27
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And that's where I found myself when I was born in 1989.
00:03:33
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my parents split up and I was raised primarily by my mother, not primarily entirely by my mother.
00:03:38
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And I didn't meet my father until I was 10 years old.
00:03:41
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So I was lacking a number of blueprints, um, the blueprint of male identity, just generally speaking.
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Uh, I think fathers and male figures play a very pivotal role in the upbringing of young men, but then also, uh,
00:03:59
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the blackness, the black piece of my of my experience as well.
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And so and as a young black male in general in the United States, there's not many blueprints for how how you can be and what what are you supposed to be?
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It's oftentimes you're presented with two options, be an athlete or an entertainer.
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And so as I came up into the world,
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I struggled a lot to figure out what my path is and what those struggles look like for me was being in fourth grade and kind of getting to the age of 10 years old where I was looking for male
Finding Mentorship in Big Brothers
00:04:37
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figures of influence.
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And so my mother put me in the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program and she wanted me to have a black male mentor in that program.
00:04:45
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And they told her that the wait list for a black male big brother was two years.
00:04:50
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as as destiny would have it, if you will, I was ended up being paired with a black male mentor in a very short period of time was kind of an anomaly.
00:04:59
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Kevin Torrance had just moved from Detroit, Michigan to Madison, Wisconsin.
00:05:03
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And that's who I was paired with a 38 39 year old black male mentor with no kids.
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And so he was really a guiding force in my life.
Challenges in Education System
00:05:11
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Fast forward two years later, in sixth grade, I was diagnosed with a learning disability.
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of which I don't exactly know what it pertained to.
00:05:21
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But in the school system for black children,
00:05:28
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learning disabilities and behavioral plans, you know, detention, suspensions are two of the main ways in which black students are kind of sidelined within the education system.
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So I struggled greatly with it.
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And my mother, you know, she really pushed back against the education system and demanded that I
00:05:50
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was educated.
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She did her best and I ended up graduating with a 2.3 GPA out of high school.
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And so I kind of look at the end of high school as like the starting point of life.
00:06:02
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And I left high school with very little understanding, despite having a mother who was very involved in my life and despite having a black male mentor with very little understanding of what I could be in this world.
Overcoming Doubts and Perseverance
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and very little understanding of my Black identity.
00:06:21
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My school teachers, they gave me the impression that I was not intelligent and almost also dually incapable of being taught.
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That's the impression that I got.
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So that was the start of my journey in this world.
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Was there sort of an internal compass that told you that
00:06:46
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they were wrong or that allowed you to sort of navigate from that very limited perspective?
00:06:54
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No, um, there really wasn't.
00:06:58
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Um,
00:07:00
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In fact, it was the exact opposite.
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They had convinced me that I wasn't smart.
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I graduated high school believing that I was not smart and I couldn't figure out like some kids would come to class and they would, you know, they could just get the assignments right away and they knew all all the answers to questions.
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They knew how to study.
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And I just, for whatever reason, really struggled with it.
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And I I believe that I learned differently.
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And, you know, so.
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It just took a long time, but it was really just the perseverance of my mom to help me to keep me like afloat until I kind of got to an age where I was able to take agency over my own life and my own educational journey.
00:07:43
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And that was when I was 21 years old.
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Mm hmm.
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Were there ways or strategies that you were able to resist maybe peer pressures to go a different direction?
Peer Pressure and Biracial Struggles
00:07:53
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We talk so much about the school to prison pipeline and becoming a statistic as opposed to somebody who succeeds.
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Did you?
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Yeah.
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So with peer pressure, so socially, I also struggled a lot with making friends.
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And for black children, there's like multiple categories of
00:08:20
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what we can fall into.
00:08:22
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And people give you all types of percentages.
00:08:23
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Some people will say it's the 10, 60 and 30 model where it's like the 10% that are high achieving the 30% that are like those that are involved in very risky behaviors.
00:08:35
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And then there's the 60% that's just kind of caught in the middle that doesn't get attention because they're not the top 10% and they're not the 30%.
00:08:41
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I don't, I don't know what those numbers are.
00:08:43
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I don't, I don't pretend to prescribe to that model, but I would say it, it has some truth to it.
00:08:49
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Um,
00:08:50
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And so there's multiple categories, I would say, just of like what black youth can fall into.
00:08:58
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And some of them are, for a variety of reasons, more into that group that might end up in prison, might end up in jail, might end up doing gun violence.
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There's some that might fall into the category of like drugs and alcohol.
00:09:11
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And I have alcoholism on both sides of my family.
00:09:14
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And so I think that was the main one that my mom was concerned about.
00:09:17
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And
00:09:17
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in the American culture, you know, like drinking is a part of teenage culture.
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So that's the one that most that she most saw for me was once I became a teenager, like out of high school, just like experimenting with drinking and things of that nature.
00:09:31
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So I never, I never particularly was called to the prison, the pipeline path.
00:09:40
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But my brother was and so as a young mother of three children by herself, like that's what my mom was constantly worried about was like putting out the fires in our life and also worried about like where we headed.
00:09:51
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And mind you, we're the three first three, me, my brother, my sister, we're the first three black children in our family.
00:09:57
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There's no
00:09:58
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and I'm being the oldest, there's no model to show what we're going to become.
00:10:03
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It's kind of a question mark.
00:10:04
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And, you know, my mom was ostracized to a degree from society because it's like, here she is as a single mother, you have three children, they're biracial.
00:10:14
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So she broke a lot of traditional norms from her cultural background, which was, you know, dating and marrying a black man.
00:10:23
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And then to end up with three black children is kind of like the I told you so kind of a deal.
00:10:28
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And so she had to push back against that and kind of raise us.
00:10:32
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And I'm the first.
00:10:33
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I'm the oldest.
00:10:33
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So it's like there's nobody in front of me like, yeah, I have white cousins, I have white uncles, but I can't really look to them and say that's a model of what I could be because they're not black.
00:10:41
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They're not going through things.
00:10:42
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Their name is not Locky on my mom's brothers and sisters names are a Christian, you know, James, Jim, Thomas.
00:10:50
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And here's Locky on with no father.
00:10:53
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And, you know,
00:10:55
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a biracial identity.
00:10:56
Speaker
So there was a lot of uncertainty growing up and a lot of ways that we could have gone, a lot of different quote unquote buckets as you will, that we could have ended up in.
00:11:06
Speaker
And really just a testament to my mother's strength and that we ended up the way we did.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, I've spoken to biracial youth who have said to me that sometimes they find themselves in a place where they're not black enough for their black friends and not white enough for their white friends.
00:11:31
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And it's really hard to kind of start to navigate, you know, their own sense of identity.
00:11:36
Speaker
I don't know if you relate to any of that at all, but I don't know that you did you did you find acceptance?
00:11:43
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or lack of acceptance, you know, growing up?
00:11:49
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I really wasn't accepted by my peers.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I don't think it had to do with as much with race as it just, I like, it's just like, I'll put it like this, anything that like came easy to people in life, never came easy to me, right?
00:12:04
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Grades,
00:12:05
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friends, I just struggled with all of them.
00:12:08
Speaker
And it took me a long time till I was later in life.
00:12:10
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So I really like came to grow into my own.
00:12:12
Speaker
And that's one thing that my mom always said to me was like, you just, you're a late bloomer, you just develop later.
00:12:17
Speaker
Now, when you're younger, that's kind of like an embarrassing thing to hear.
00:12:19
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Like, okay, mom, like, don't keep saying that out loud in front of all these people.
00:12:23
Speaker
But
00:12:24
Speaker
You know, as I look back, like it's like it's true.
00:12:26
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And so once I was able to really understand that and like and that was part of me, like learning how I learn was like, OK, it's going to take you a little bit longer.
00:12:33
Speaker
But once you do, like I have these like bursts, like we're all sudden like I'll just like spring forward and like all these things will start clicking for me.
00:12:41
Speaker
So what I would say, though,
00:12:43
Speaker
particularly about my biracial identity is just that like I personally never felt a lot of times, quote unquote, black enough.
00:12:52
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Like it's like, oh, like, you know, like you don't have these certain stories or these certain things or you don't talk this certain way.
00:13:01
Speaker
And for my I've done a lot of digging into like, you know, interviews and talking to a lot of other people who are biracial.
00:13:07
Speaker
And I think that's a very common thing.
00:13:10
Speaker
And I'm just going to say, particularly to being biracially black and white.
00:13:15
Speaker
When you add other elements like that's another thing I didn't know growing up.
00:13:19
Speaker
I only knew really two races of people, black people.
00:13:22
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Well, no, in relation to being mixed, because a lot of people would say that when I was growing up, they're like, oh, my peers, they would say, oh, you're mixed.
00:13:30
Speaker
And I only knew of black and white people being mixed.
00:13:32
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I didn't realize that you could be black and Japanese or black and Latino.
00:13:37
Speaker
So
00:13:39
Speaker
I had a very rudimentary understanding of race.
00:13:42
Speaker
And so for me growing up, I felt called and pushed to display my Blackness.
00:13:52
Speaker
And I always felt lacking within that department.
00:13:56
Speaker
And I think it's an experience that a lot of Black people feel, biracial Black people feel because of the gravitational pull of Black culture and within Black culture.
00:14:08
Speaker
as I discovered when I was older, that everybody's put in that box.
00:14:13
Speaker
You could be as black as night and they'll still, there's certain activities that you're supposed to do certain things, how you're supposed to act, how as a black male, how you're supposed to handle conflict, how you're supposed to talk, what activities.
00:14:25
Speaker
And it's, and it's, it's a, it is a,
00:14:28
Speaker
byproduct of white supremacy that squeezes black people into a box and defines what we can do.
00:14:36
Speaker
But for white people, they're allowed to do anything.
00:14:39
Speaker
They can appropriate any culture.
00:14:42
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You'll never hear a white person say to another white person, you're not acting white enough.
00:14:47
Speaker
They can go they can go be and do anything.
00:14:49
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And that's that's what they've built for themselves by oppressing other cultures.
00:14:54
Speaker
And for black people, though, we are always put into a box of your black.
00:14:57
Speaker
You can you can only play basketball and rap.
00:15:00
Speaker
You can't like rock music.
00:15:01
Speaker
You can't you can't like comic books.
00:15:04
Speaker
You can't you can't be.
00:15:08
Speaker
any of these other things.
00:15:09
Speaker
You can't go skiing.
00:15:09
Speaker
You can't do these other things.
00:15:11
Speaker
Those are only quote unquote white activities.
00:15:13
Speaker
And every white activity is associated with all of the great things in life, whether it's like getting good grades or, you know, traveling around the world or whatever it might be.
00:15:23
Speaker
So there's, we, you know, we are a lot of times forced in certain situations and it goes, it dates all the way back to slavery and, um,
00:15:38
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things of that nature, self hate.
Founding Word is Bond
00:15:43
Speaker
Tell me a little bit more about the nonprofit and what, what prompted you to begin it and what its work is all about.
00:15:51
Speaker
So word is bond is the nonprofit started in 2017 when I was just a first finishing my first year.
00:15:59
Speaker
Um, um,
00:16:02
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teaching here in Portland, Oregon.
00:16:03
Speaker
And it's my freedom dream.
00:16:06
Speaker
A freedom dream is that ultimate dream if you had no limits, no bounds to what you could be.
00:16:14
Speaker
And it's the culmination of all the experiences that I just described to you.
00:16:19
Speaker
It's my answer to all of those.
00:16:21
Speaker
It's a program that works to empower young Black men ages 15 to 20 years old.
00:16:26
Speaker
So we get them when they're 15 and we work with them to about roughly 20 years old when they are out of high school.
00:16:32
Speaker
And it provides everything that is lacking in society to guide black men towards their ultimate purpose.
00:16:40
Speaker
And each young black man has their own purpose.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so our mission statement is, what if young black men were empowered to their fullest potential?
00:16:49
Speaker
And so...
00:16:51
Speaker
And that's the question that I posed to all of our young men.
00:16:56
Speaker
And then when I look back at my younger self is what if I had been empowered?
00:16:59
Speaker
What if I'd been given the tools?
00:17:01
Speaker
What if I'd been taught truly about the history of Black people and our connection to Africa?
00:17:07
Speaker
What if I had the platform to tell my story, to know that my story is important and that I even had a story, because I walked around for so long without knowing that I had a story or knowing the story was valuable.
00:17:19
Speaker
And so we have a summer internship program called Rising Leaders, which is three years long and gives them public speaking skills, civic engagement skills, career prep, college preparation skills, validates their stories and allows them to tell it in powerful ways.
00:17:35
Speaker
As you mentioned in the introduction, you talked about poetry and photography.
00:17:39
Speaker
So we do a photography project every summer where the young men get to design their own self-portraits to imagine themselves in powerful images.
Empowerment vs. Support
00:17:49
Speaker
We do poetry where they get to write poems about their stories and they get published into a book.
00:17:55
Speaker
We take them camping.
00:17:57
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We take them outside of the city.
00:17:59
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We're going to Ghana this summer.
00:18:01
Speaker
So basically every single thing that I didn't have, not didn't have, but...
00:18:08
Speaker
didn't see growing up, I've poured into Word is Bond.
00:18:10
Speaker
And I came up with this recently, this interesting separation between having support and being empowered.
00:18:18
Speaker
And what my mom and what Kevin Torrance provided me with was support.
00:18:23
Speaker
But it's different than empowerment.
00:18:24
Speaker
Support is like keeps you afloat, but empowerment shoots you off like a rocket.
00:18:30
Speaker
And so we harness the soul force that is Black Boy Joy.
00:18:35
Speaker
And we strap like a rocket to the back of these young men's back and we shoot them into the atmosphere to become whatever it is that they desire to be.
Expansion and Global Connections
00:18:48
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:18:49
Speaker
You have, you've assembled quite a prestigious list of partners to, you know, to support your work, Trailblazers, Widening Kennedy, you know, do you have, what are some of the long-term goals of what you want to accomplish with the organization?
00:19:10
Speaker
I want to transport it to different cities across the country.
00:19:14
Speaker
I think that that's really important, that there should be a Word is Bond chapter everywhere.
00:19:18
Speaker
that every young black man knows that there's a program that he can go to, to have the support and take, um, take off in the way that they want to.
00:19:28
Speaker
Um, um, one part of the goal is to get to Africa, which we're going to do this summer.
00:19:33
Speaker
We're taking 15 of our, our senior leaders, ambassadors to Ghana for two weeks.
00:19:39
Speaker
So that's part of the goal of like, um,
00:19:43
Speaker
fleshing out the full program.
00:19:45
Speaker
Like the whole vision hasn't even been completed yet.
00:19:48
Speaker
I'm like George Lucas, you know, we did A New Hope, we did Empire Strikes Back, and this summer we're going to do Return of the Jedi.
00:19:56
Speaker
So there's that.
00:20:00
Speaker
You know, one of my greatest influences growing up
00:20:04
Speaker
was Barack Obama.
00:20:06
Speaker
And it's a freedom dream of mine to have him, to meet him and have him meet some of our young men.
00:20:14
Speaker
So that's another part of what I want to do.
00:20:19
Speaker
And just make the program sustainable, you know, right?
00:20:21
Speaker
We're just kind of coming out of that phase where the program is just like, you
00:20:27
Speaker
you know, heavily reliant on me.
00:20:30
Speaker
And now we're at a place where we have multiple employees where we can, it can survive on its own.
00:20:36
Speaker
And that's a really good feeling because you know, it's taken when you create something if you really are going to tell you tell somebody this is my freedom dream, it's going to require everything from you.
00:20:46
Speaker
And I just I just was talking with one of my ambassadors this weekend.
00:20:50
Speaker
And he was saying Mr Drury,
00:20:52
Speaker
Did you ever have to call your mom and tell her you wanted to quit college?
00:20:55
Speaker
Because that's what I had to do this weekend.
00:20:58
Speaker
I just was so frustrated with it.
00:21:00
Speaker
And my response to him was, until you want to quit something, you've never really attempted it.
00:21:07
Speaker
And I wanted to quit Word is Bond in about 2020, 2021.
00:21:09
Speaker
And I told him that.
00:21:11
Speaker
I was like, you know,
00:21:15
Speaker
It until you if you don't if if you when you have a freedom dream, you pour everything you have into it and then it's it's not even enough.
00:21:25
Speaker
And you get to a wall and you're like, oh, my gosh, like this is too much.
00:21:28
Speaker
Like, let's just let's just forget about it.
00:21:30
Speaker
And so.
00:21:32
Speaker
I reached that point and I was telling this young man to speak and it was critical and the further development of word is bond because it really made you sit back and see how much do you want it?
00:21:42
Speaker
Where do you want to go?
00:21:43
Speaker
And so I believe that that thought in your mind, um, is really critical.
00:21:48
Speaker
And so that was kind of my response to him.
00:21:49
Speaker
And, and as I'm, you know, looking at what's next for word is bond, that part was really important for me.
00:21:54
Speaker
And now I'm at a place where, um,
00:21:57
Speaker
I really know the purpose of what Word is Bond is and why it means so much to me and, you know, growing it and helping it become a sustainable thing that isn't just a project of Lockeana, but it is its own standalone organization.
00:22:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, you're going to love Ghana.
00:22:18
Speaker
I've been, I think, maybe six or seven times we have a summer study abroad program.
00:22:23
Speaker
I'm not going this year, otherwise it might have overlapped with when you're going to be there.
00:22:26
Speaker
But it's a really vibrant place and just inspiring in so many ways.
00:22:37
Speaker
You know, obviously there's poverty, but what you discover is that people are rich, you know, in terms of their sense of spirit.
00:22:46
Speaker
and that's significant.
Racial Progress and Cultural Impact
00:22:49
Speaker
I want to ask you, you know, so you mentioned President Obama, and I think for many people, we wanted to believe that his presidency marked a turning point historically in just our nation's, you know, sense of how to think and talk about race, but it's fair to say that we move backwards
00:23:13
Speaker
You know, as we're seeing just efforts to outlaw discussion of race and ethnicity and gender in certain states and, you know, just sort of the appropriation of the term woke or wokeism and sort of using it in a mocking way.
00:23:34
Speaker
And I'm just curious, you know, what your thoughts are about just kind of where we are at this in this point in time and where we go.
00:23:44
Speaker
to just have a more sensible perspective around these topics, you know?
00:23:53
Speaker
Historically, we are right where history has shown us that we've always been in our country.
00:24:04
Speaker
So what we're experiencing right now is
00:24:06
Speaker
you know, you've heard of the term backlash, we're facing a white lash.
00:24:10
Speaker
And every time that there's been significant progress for African Americans within our country, we have faced a white lash.
00:24:18
Speaker
Um, when, um, slavery was finally, um, abolished except for the 13th amendment in 1865, when black people were freed from bondage, um,
00:24:29
Speaker
There was the implementation of the Jim Crow laws and racialized segregation across our country.
00:24:35
Speaker
So as soon as there was freedom, white people in the South immediately lurched back with extreme violence.
00:24:42
Speaker
And so that was that experience in there.
00:24:45
Speaker
And then in the 60s, when black people finally got the right to vote and the passage of the civil rights movement, there was...
00:24:55
Speaker
the passage of mass incarceration and all of that that went on after Martin Luther King was assassinated and Malcolm X and all of those figures.
00:25:05
Speaker
And so what we're experiencing with then now current times with with with President Obama becoming president, there's no coincidence that the president to follow him was was was so outrageously racist and.
00:25:26
Speaker
agitator of race issues.
00:25:29
Speaker
It follows a pattern that we've seen throughout our country.
00:25:32
Speaker
But I think what's also happening, you know, speaking of my students and just, you know, we're always having these conversations.
00:25:39
Speaker
And so they were asking the same thing and they were saying something about, you know, do you think our black leaders in the 60s and 50s would be disappointed because we don't have those leaders anymore?
00:25:49
Speaker
And I think, and what I said to them is that, you know, first of all,
00:25:54
Speaker
when you look back, history is always rewritten, right?
00:25:57
Speaker
When Martin Luther King was assassinated, he wasn't the Martin Luther King that we had today.
00:26:02
Speaker
Half the country, half of the white people didn't like him.
00:26:04
Speaker
There was no federal holiday.
00:26:05
Speaker
It wasn't all packaged into this nice thing that it is today.
00:26:10
Speaker
And so...
00:26:11
Speaker
And so in today's era, I believe we're making tremendous progress and we don't have those leaders in the way that they have.
00:26:19
Speaker
They had them.
00:26:20
Speaker
But that's us looking back what we have right now with the Black Lives Matter movement and other ways and other similar efforts is is a huge amount of leaders in so many different industries, whether it's
00:26:38
Speaker
education and we see black women achieving at the highest levels ever, whether we see black students being able to go to colleges, whether we see even the fact of black education, even being a topic being talked about nationally with black courses and stuff like that.
00:26:56
Speaker
I believe that we are the freedom dream of our ancestors and we are doing so many amazing things
00:27:04
Speaker
right now and pushing the agenda of black people for that.
00:27:07
Speaker
It even is a national conversation.
00:27:09
Speaker
It wasn't even a conversation before.
00:27:10
Speaker
It wasn't even a debate.
00:27:12
Speaker
It wasn't even nothing.
00:27:13
Speaker
And so we've moved tremendously far and we're doing it in so many different ways in arts.
00:27:18
Speaker
Look at hip hop and how hip hop has become the number one entertainment and art form across the entire world and how we continue to influence the music.
00:27:28
Speaker
Look at
00:27:30
Speaker
these the cinematography industry with movies that like Jordan Peele is doing with Get Out and and us and things of that nature or black political leaders, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, all of those folks.
00:27:49
Speaker
I think that there is a tremendous tech industry.
00:27:52
Speaker
There's a tremendous
00:27:53
Speaker
outpouring of of black thought ideas, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:27:58
Speaker
The list goes on.
00:28:00
Speaker
We are there.
00:28:01
Speaker
We got a mission to the moon coming up soon and a black astronaut is going to be the first black astronaut on the moon.
00:28:07
Speaker
So I think that we are we're having another moment despite heightened racial racial tension, despite executions of black people at the hands of law enforcement.
00:28:19
Speaker
So I think that we are
00:28:24
Speaker
we have to also appreciate the things that we're doing right right now.
00:28:28
Speaker
And I think that there is a lot that we are doing and have the ability to do that was never possible before.
00:28:34
Speaker
So that's how I look at it.
00:28:37
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:28:38
Speaker
We've been talking with Latiana Drury, the founder and executive director of Word is Bond.
Resources and Contact Information
00:28:43
Speaker
How do folks find you on the internet URL or other information in terms of the organization and the work that you're doing?
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:52
Speaker
So, um, to find word is bond, my word is bond.org.
00:28:57
Speaker
Um, you can find us on social media.
00:28:59
Speaker
Word is bond PDX.
00:29:01
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.
00:29:06
Speaker
If you want to, um, uh, talk directly with me.
00:29:09
Speaker
Um, my website is Lachiana Drury.com.
00:29:12
Speaker
That's L-A-K-A-Y-A-N-A-D-R-U-R-Y.com.
00:29:17
Speaker
I do consulting.
00:29:18
Speaker
I do, um, uh,
00:29:20
Speaker
thought workshops, anything like that, poetry workshops.
00:29:26
Speaker
And yeah, I just appreciate your time, your thoughtful questions.
00:29:29
Speaker
Thank you.
00:29:29
Speaker
I look forward to connecting.
00:29:32
Speaker
Thank you.
00:29:32
Speaker
Appreciate it.
00:29:35
Speaker
Take care.
00:29:40
Speaker
How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:29:43
Speaker
For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.