Sometimes the things that we write do not age well, and other times the things that we write are timeless. Often it is almost impossible in the moment to know which will be the case. Social distancing has lasted longer than I personally predicted, which means that we are still unsure where the future is taking us. It is my opinion that much of what we say about the future in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic is fairly unreliable. Today our country is four months in to various stages of handling and understanding the virus. Right now, some are predicting that social distancing and large event cancellations will last through the end of 2020 and maybe longer.
I left my job as a Chief Community Development Officer for a large organization in the financial services industry in early April. My state had just begun to shut down for the pandemic, and economic impacts were beginning to be felt. My former role was identifying ways the organization could better support financially challenged communities in our territory. Because of the systemic racism involved in the reasons that communities are poor, there is a color line in financial services that leads directly to negative impacts on minority communities. It is impossible to do impactful work toward solving social problems without doing diversity, equity and inclusion work. As my team was working on grants in early March, I wondered if…
