Congratulations to WEPOWER, recipient of our 2021 Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism!
The Award for Growing in Equity and Antiracism recognizes a person, organization, institution, or initiative that:
Demonstrates a deep and honest commitment to transforming work being done in the St. Louis region so that it is more equitable, just, and antiracist.
“Walks the talk”—goes beyond verbal commitments to ask hard questions, embrace and push through discomfort, work to rectify inequities where they exist, and take action.
Actively works to dismantle systems of oppression.
Humans of St. Louis storyteller Lindy Drew met with Charli Cooksey, WEPOWER’s Founder and CEO, to learn more about her and the work her team does. Here’s some of what Charli had to say.
Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER (Humans of St. Louis / Lindy Drew)
The most grounding moments I have are when I am in relationship with and proximate and deeply listening to Black women — Black mothers and Black childhood providers, in particular. They keep me grounded in who I’m accountable to, why I’m doing this work, why it’s urgent, and where to focus. From 2018 to 2020, a group of organizations had been working really hard to gear up for a ballot measure in St. Louis County to win up to $84 million per year for early childhood education. That would have been the first time in the history of St. Louis that there would be local dedicated public funding for early childhood and it would have been a significant amount that was going to be guaranteed for ECE centers and public schools with pre-k programs with the majority of dollars focused on North St. Louis County.
It’s interesting because all of our systems were failing Black families before the pandemic and the pandemic exacerbated things that we knew were already unacceptable. So it was something that was desperately needed and we were working super hard. We had our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed and had this beautiful campaign launch for Ready By Five. We got together in the school gym of a UCity elementary school with hundreds of folks and kicked it off with a signature-gathering initiative because we needed to get a little over 40,000 signatures to be placed on the ballot by November 2020.
We had a plan. We were hitting the ground. And there was so much energy in the space. We even turned off the lights and turned on our phone lights, waving them in the air, declaring our commitment to children and to winning the ballot measure. Then we transitioned to a training of organizing where we had tons of folks there committed to learning how to build power to win money for our babies, birth to five years old. The next week, our team and partners gathered signatures all day from people while standing in the rain. We were just building so much momentum. We had collected our first 1,000 signatures almost immediately after the campaign launched. Then the pandemic hit.
The pandemic really stopped us in our tracks because, in order to get on the ballot, we had to be super grassroots. We needed to knock on doors, we needed to be standing outside of grocery stores, we needed to go to churches and early childhood education centers to talk to anyone we could to get their support to get us on the ballot to win that $84 million. What a gut punch to the stomach to be so close to something we’d been working on for so long and to see so much hope and energy from a group of providers and parents who felt neglected by our region for so long.
When that happened we were like, “This is over. We’ll have to figure out another year and time to do this again. There’s no way we can do it amidst the pandemic and not seeing an end in sight.” But we also said, “We need to have conversations. We need to ask our base — mothers, educators, and Black women — ‘What should we do? How do we stay accountable to you all and follow your lead?’” And that’s when they said, “We need this money! This isn’t over. Come up with Plan B.” And we did.
The humbling piece of all of this was the tension of everyday Black folks being failed by the ECE system being at odds with local leaders; equity leaders; and civic, business, and philanthropic leaders. And it’s hard because there are leaders who have large platforms and voices and opinions, and folks who don’t have those can shout something at the top of their lungs and no one hears it. But because the person with the larger platform can get a meeting with a county executive or mayor or can tweet something that gets a few likes, their voice tends to get amplified more than those being failed by our system.
That moment reminded me that we are accountable to everyday Black folks making minimum wage, working hard to educate our babies, working so hard that they can’t give their own children the education they need because it costs too much to go to a center and there aren’t enough centers for them. So asking myself, “What is it that I need to do?” reminded me this is my calling and to stay focused.
We went back to the drawing board and Plan B was to get the county council to get us on the ballot. We had seven council members and needed four to vote in support of the ballot measure. At the top of the day when it was time to vote in April 2020, we had four votes but then found out the ballot language had changed. Our original intent was that the $84 million was 100% for early childhood education and would get equitably allocated to centers and public schools with those most marginalized and directly impacted by systemic racism. And somehow that was not what was to be presented to be voted on.
It was a hard year. And we finally had to say, “It’s not worth pursuing this ballot measure if it doesn’t preserve the integrity of our intentions. If it’s not going to be guaranteed for the early childhood system, then this isn’t for us.” It wasn’t meant to happen, but we still had work to do. A few months later, a measure to secure public funding for early childhood ended up on a ballot in St. Louis City for $2.4 million per year and we pivoted quickly to gear up for that. To go from no public funding to some public funding was still a huge feat in itself.
There’s over a billion-dollar gap for funding in early childhood per year, which is unacceptable. That means there are about 50,000 children every year who don’t get to go to early childhood education programs because there aren’t enough seats. And of the ones who do go, only about 19% of them are subsidized, which means the system really is designed for middle-class to affluent families who can pay their way into a quality center. And what else is pretty alarming is that only about 5% of centers across the city and country are accredited, which is another indicator of quality. So out of 90,000 children, only about 5% have access to a quality early childhood center.
There’s so much data that shows birth to five is the most transformative time of a human’s life. What we do and how we treat our babies is going to leave ripples effects that impact their life trajectory. And what impacts our children impacts not just them but our entire region. This is why a lack of investment in early childhood education is a lack of investment in us being able to create a region that is truly thriving.
There were all these rumors and people conspiracy theorizing around what the campaign was and what WEPOWER was and wasn’t and these accusations that we were against the teachers union and teachers’ rights. Yet, we were doing all this work because we deeply believe in the power of educators and the impact they have on the lives of children. Educators have the most important job there is. And we believe they should have all the rights and benefits in the world. So we had to navigate the noise in spaces that proclaim equity but don’t practice equity.
It was discouraging, but every time we knocked on a door to talk to a voter, we were reminded that this was our base. We were reminded that everyday people all across the city want to see change and want to see an investment in early childhood education. So whenever we felt down we were like, “Let’s go knock on some doors. We are accountable to Black families and communities who have been ignored for generations in this region.” And talking to them reminded us, “You know why you’re here. Don’t get distracted by the noise.” And in the end, we won the city ballot measure in November 2020 after running a very brief and ambitious campaign.
Vanessa was a member of WEPOWER’s Early Childhood Tomorrow Builders Fellowship when 14 fellows came together to work collaboratively with a lot of other organizations and community members to reimagine how early childhood education really functions. And that was part of the catalyst for pursuing the ballot measure because one of the solutions they came up with after hearing from tons of people was that more public funding was needed. So she went from being a fellow to us meeting one day over lunch to just talk about life. And the next thing I knew, she went from being a community leader to a member of the WEPOWER team and leading our economic justice work. Now, after leading early childhood work as a mother and community leader, she ran and has become the first Latina school board member in the history of the Ritenour School District.
It’s been beautiful to see her go from ‘this system needs to change’ to ‘I’m changing the system and it’s going to change because of me wielding my power unapologetically and doing so in my community through a formal seat at the table.’ That’s all great stuff, but the spirit of how she leads is what energizes me. She leads with compassion, with reflection, and with a continuous commitment to learning and growing vulnerably. Every day there’s a new insight she has about the world and how it impacts her and her children. The humanity she brings to her leadership and conversations around shifting systems is just so inspiring. It reminds me that this is the work — creating spaces for folks to recognize their brilliance and activate it in relation to others toward power building for our children.
There’s a lot that happens throughout a WEPOWER cohort. We do a half-day tour through St. Louis City and County to understand the historical context that has impacted the current state of education. And that’s an overwhelming experience to see how many ways policies and racism have divided our region and ultimately harmed our children. We do a session with NCCJ to explore our own identities and how oppression impacts the way we show up and engage with each other along with ways to uncondition that oppression and shift towards a culture of liberation.
What tends to be really pivotal for folks is our data walk where we just blast data on all the walls of a room about the current system. Unfortunately, when you disaggregate the data by race and class, it never evokes happiness and joy. It’s gut-wrenching to see the numbers and disparities. And in most cases, not only are things not changing, they’re getting worse. The more we become a country where the majority are people of color, the more disparity we’re seeing. When we look at everything and step back to realize this is our truth, that shifts folks from curiosity to rage and from rage to action.
I believe in this adrienne maree brown concept and Emergent Strategy principle: trust the people and the people will become trustworthy. We are the solution. We are the answers. Oftentimes, we overcomplicate things. We theorize and try to make sense of complicated visuals and graphics. And if we do this to get there to then get there to get to an outcome to… But the thing is pretty simple. Create a space for folks who are being failed by a system to wrestle with what the best solutions are for themselves, their families, and their communities. And, for me, it’s a testament to all we gotta do is listen and move out the way for folks to lead the change. So I hope to create enough proof points for this to become the new norm and not just be a WEPOWER thing but it becomes as common as the air we breathe. We’re creating the conditions for democracy to become normalized — not something that’s cool or an experiment, but the way we see and solve problems. And we do it in a way in St. Louis that works for us all.
Can you share about the relationships formed from the people of WEPOWER coming together?
The first WEPOWER cohort has been amazing to see because those women have become inseparable. I was just talking with four of our original power builders. They were the first community leaders with WEPOWER who kicked off a campaign advocating for Saint Louis Public Schools to increase budget transparency and equity in 2018. Most of them did not know each other. They just came because we called and said, “Please come to this program.” Now, a few years later, they’re best friends. They’re sisters. They see each other, work with each other, talk with each other. They pray for each other. And at the end of the day, they support each other. It’s magical the way they’ve built a community amongst themselves. Recently, they were canvassing in North St. Louis to get feedback from residents on the vision for what it looks like to build wealth in neighborhoods. And they were recruiting people to join the next round of our Power-Building Academy.
On a Saturday night, Miss Linda called me and said, “Now I’m calling you to preach to you. I don’t want to sound like your mom, but I’m doing this because I love you.” And she gave me all these pieces of advice about what we need to do at WEPOWER. I told her, “You know what? You’re right. That’s all great stuff.” And really the name is perfect because it’s the power of we. It’s not like I’m just in this room making decisions, but it’s the collective. It’s all of us bringing our experiences and wisdom together to say, “How do we make the sum greater than the individual parts?” Now I’m thinking every day about how we can start to act on those things Miss Linda told me that night. And when she came in on Monday to get some more material for canvassing, she asked, “You remember my name, right?” I looked at her and giggled in disbelief at her question. “Yes, Miss Linda.” She was like, “No. Mama!” She’s a jokester. So I’ve been calling her that. And it speaks to the community we’re building that’s rooted in joy and fun but also a commitment to each other and our future.
The Power-Building Academy is about electoral and issue-based organizing. Tomorrow Builders is about reimagining the system. Chisholm's Chair gets Black and Latinx women ready for public office. Those three programs are made up of almost 300 community members. And then we’ll launch our next round of leadership programming soon too.
There’s an organization in Arizona called LUCHA - Living United for Change in Arizona that pretty much led the effort to flip Arizona blue. All the things we saw that felt like they came out of nowhere in Arizona during the 2020 Presidential election were in part due to their leadership through years of grassroots power-building, community building, and base building. So they’re the dream. LUCHA’s led by these two dope Latino and Latina leaders who are co-executive directors. We’ve met with them and with other folks who have worked with them. And every time we learn more about them, it’s like that’s what we’re trying to build here in St. Louis — a powerful community made of thousands of folks fighting for their own liberation, winning, and doing it so unapologetically.
I remember them telling a story of how they kicked off a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage in Arizona and everyone told them, “You’re crazy. Don’t do it. We’re not giving you any money to do it.” And they were like, “We don’t care if you tell us not to do it and we don’t care if you’re not gonna give us money. We’re going to win regardless.” So without any support from traditional progressives, they ran that ballot measure and they won. Their story and evolution are a reminder for me to keep going, remember who your base is, stay focused on staying accountable to them, and to do unflinching things that need to happen.
Your CBN award is for growing in equity and antiracism, and this work has been pumping through your veins for a while now. What does it mean to you to receive this award?
The work continues. I live in North St. Louis and I’ve lived here my whole life. It’s exciting to celebrate receiving an award that acknowledges a commitment to equity, so I’m grateful for that. But it’s hard to celebrate an award about equity when the outcomes haven’t shifted yet. Every day I wake up, I’m reminded that we have so much work to do. And a lot of activities don’t mean outcomes are shifting. Every day I’m questioning, “How do I do the best I can to at least feel like we’re on track to shift outcomes?” What Forward Through Ferguson’s done is a great job of reminding the region that racial equity’s not a feeling, it’s an outcome. So folks are recognizing we can do this differently and achieve success in the process. And I still go to sleep at night wondering, “How close are we to moving beyond discussion and activity to people’s lives measurably changing?”
If you could take some of the hurts and pains away, what would they be?
Status quo. St. Louis has a way of being conditioned to fiercely and proudly protect stability over progress. And we can be risk-averse at times and it shows up in many ways that divide us. Folks who I would have hoped we could be in community with and that WEPOWER could have been collaborative with have actually been our biggest critics. There’s nothing wrong with critique, but I do find it discouraging that we get stuck there instead of finding enough common ground to move forward. There’s just too much at stake here. There are too many folks being killed every day, too many folks being failed by the education system, too many folks living in poverty beyond comprehension for us to get bogged down in politics. I wish we could remove ego. I wish we could have uncomfortable conversations and be okay with disagreeing but still discuss, “What’s the one thing we can commit to together so we can move something forward for the sake of our children and our future?”
What are the North stars that WEPOWER holds on tight to for how people can think about growing in equity and antiracism work?
Vulnerability, truth-telling, and data. Vulnerability is being okay with saying, “We messed up. We don’t have the answers.” Or, “I don’t know. Can you help us figure this out?” Vulnerability looks like this is what didn’t work this time, so this is what we’re going to do next time. Vulnerability with sharing how we’re feeling in a moment, being in a space where we can process our emotions, where people can cry but laugh at the same time. That culture of vulnerability has really allowed us to navigate everything internally as a team but also with our community members.
For truth-telling and data, it’s hard to refute the data even though people try. The data is so alarming but also so honest. We use it to hold ourselves accountable. We are committed to shifting these outcomes because Black and Brown communities deserve not just to have people saying the right things, but for their quality of life to change. We do have a unique way of holding up data and saying, “This is the current state of things and we’re going to be pursuing solutions that will shift these data points.” We don’t just look at the data, but we say when something is unacceptable. We’ve done that in the early childhood and K-12 educational spaces. We get push back, but we don’t stop. We leverage data to continuously create a sense of urgency so more folks understand that Black and Brown folks deserve better than these data points.
When’s a time you had to be vulnerable in the work you do?
It’s not that I had to be, but that there are moments when I couldn’t help myself. My vulnerability usually isn’t calculated. I’m at the tipping point, at the edge. And you’re seeing me as I am.
What did you think you were going to be when you were younger?
A ballerina or a civil rights attorney. Although I do wonder what it would be like to live in New York and travel the world dancing, I think it makes perfect sense to be where I am right now. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always felt a deep responsibility to my community. And my community’s here — it’s Fairground Park and O’Fallon Park. So I’m just grateful that I get the privilege to be here and pursue my dreams and see them come to life with my neighbors. I think it’s exactly where I need to be. It’s so, so, so hard, even traumatizing, and there are definitely days when it feels like, “You need to go somewhere else, Charli.” But I’m not giving up.
- Charli Cooksey, Founder and CEO of WEPOWER
We hope you can join us to celebrate community builders like the WEPOWER team at our Community Development Family Reunion event on September 23!
Photostory by Humans of St. Louis and Lindy Drew. Photostory narratives represent the opinions of the speaker(s) featured only and do not necessarily represent the views of the Community Builders Network of Metro St. Louis.
