June 2020

Hello Year Up,

We are looking forward to honoring and celebrating Juneteenth this Friday, June 19th, as a Day of Recognition for our Year Up community. This is the first time in our 20‐year history as an organization that we are pausing operations to give our students in L&D and all staff the opportunity to disconnect from work to connect with the meaning of this important day in our nation’s history.

We invite you to learn, participate, reflect & rejuvenate. Included hereis a set of curated resources about Juneteenth, antiracism, our American history, and ways to take action on Friday and throughout the weekend. Please leverage the resources that will be most helpful to supporting your learning goals and wherever you are in your current learning journey.

We also invite you to share what you learn and how you celebrate via Google’s Jamboard platform.

• Please add to this Jamboard: photos of your Juneteenth celebrations, sticky notes with themes that came up for you about your reflections and learning, images of quotes, people, or other visuals that connect to your Juneteenth experience, drawings using the sketch tools, or a Google doc of poetry, your reflections, etc. Please note: You don’t have to have a Google account to use the Jamboard, and only 50 people max can be in a Jamboard at the same time.

We are also providing messaging to Site and Regional Directors to share these resources with L&D students and interns today. We will encourage students and interns to learn about Juneteenth and engage with the learning materials. Depending on the corporate partner, many interns may still be working on Juneteenth, but we will guide them to use the day and weekend, in their own ways, to reflect and engage with Juneteenth learning.

Note on Timesheets: This day will remain as “hours worked” in your timecard. If your standard schedule is prepopulated in eTIME, no action needed. If you update and record your hours worked each day, please record the hours that you’d normally work on Friday, 6/19 to ensure you are paid per usual. If your site leadership has already provided guidance about how to code your timesheet because you already had planned action for Friday, June 19th, please defer to the timesheet guidance your site leadership provided.

Thank you to Marshaun Hymon for supporting us to curate these resources! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Wishing you a Happy Juneteenth,

Megan Doherty‐Baker & Antoine Andrews

Dear Year Up,

Happy Pride month!!!

We write today to recognize the month of June as LGBTQ+ Pride Month. We celebrate the presence and contributions of our LGBTQ+ community at Year Up, including our young adults and colleagues.

We are especially elated to be able to share that a decision made by the Supreme Court today ushers in a new era in the fight for equal rights for LGBT people. In a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 upholds protections against discriminating against LGBTQ+ people in the workplace. This has been a long and hard-fought victory and deserves celebration.

We lift up and honor the legacies of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, beloved legends and pivotal leaders who were at the forefront of the LGBTQ+ movement. They tirelessly advocated for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, Trans people who were incarcerated, and those affected by HIV/AIDS. After years of dealing with police raids, targeting, harassment, brutality and unsolved murders of their Trans community, they fought back during the Stonewall Riots. Their courage and commitment to justice paved the way for the first ever Pride March, which took place one year after the riots and50 years ago this year. We remember now more than ever what these leaders reminded us then, “No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”

That continued fight for and commitment to liberation is alive, well and active in this moment. It is important for our LGBTQ+ community to show up for the Black Lives Matter Movement,a movement that stands in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, and is co-founded and led by two Black Queer women, Patrice Cullors-Brignac and Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi a Nigerian-American woman and LGBTQ+ ally.

While we are proud to see many LGBTQ+ organizations demonstrate their commitment to recommitting their 2020 Pride focus to center the movement for systemic racial justice, we also acknowledge that there is still much work to do to fight against white supremacy and racism within the LGBTQ+ community, ourselves. There is still an immense amount of work to do to keep our Black Trans siblings safe from violence and transphobic policies. We honor the lives of Riah Milton, Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Tony McDade, Layla Pelaez Sanchez, and Nina Pop, and too many more transgender and gender non-conforming people who were killed by violent means this year. They should be alive.

We continue to seek liberation and to find ways to build connection and celebrate those who came before us whose lives were taken too soon. We know that creating space for community to come together to share stories and recognize those who have inspired and opened doors for us matters. With that in mind, we have created a virtual gathering place for our LGBTQ+ colleagues and allies to share memories, 2020 Pride plans, and reflections about Pride. If you are inspired, please contribute your own tributes to the link provided in celebration of our LGBTQ+ colleagues and young adults. We will keep the link open through the month of June, and we invite you to share ways in which you plan to celebrate Pride with your communities this year and ways in which you are showing up for Black Lives Matter in the process, which includes, but is not limited to, engaging in resistance, protest, and dancing.

Feel free to use the following prompts as a guide:

What Pride means to me
A favorite Pride memory
What I would say now to my younger self about Pride and being LGBTQ+
What acts of allyship look like to me
Who inspires you from your LGBTQ+ community?

We wish you all a safe, healthy, joyful, intersectional, resistant, empowering, rejuvenating and healing Pride.

Happy Pride,