Contact: Michelle Hillman
508-380-5486 (cell)
Michelle_Hillman@waysideyouth.org

Framingham, MA – Wayside Youth & Family Support Network received a grant for $29,769 from the MetroWest Health Foundation. Wayside will use the grant to create an Equity Training Center that will launch this year.

The new training center will provide educational workshops, personalized consultation services and community presentations to schools, local community groups, nonprofits and social service providers to challenge systemic racism, white privilege and increase equity within their organizations.

The goal of the center is to educate our youth and families, community partners and other nonprofits to develop anti-racist policies and practices that will challenge the strongholds of systemic racism. Trainings will be led by Wayside’s staff who are experts in diversity, equity and inclusion.

“We are beyond thankful for the grant from the MetroWest Health Foundation,” said Wayside’s President and CEO Eric Masi. “This will greatly benefit our community by educating people about diversity, inclusion, and equity. These free trainings will inform people about the daily oppression Black and brown people face and how to prevent it.”

This center intends to serve as a resource with a range of training topic available to the community and individuals including how to create systemic organizational change, talking about anti-racism with kids, examining white privilege and learning to have uncomfortable conversations about race and racism.

About Wayside Youth & Family Support Network: Founded in 1977, Wayside Youth & Family Support Network is a non-profit, nationally accredited human services agency headquartered in Framingham, Mass. dedicated to building strength, hope and resiliency through its family-based outreach services, residential treatment programs, and community-based counseling services to thousands of children, youth, and families throughout Central, Eastern and Northeastern Massachusetts. To learn more about Wayside, please visit www.waysideyouth.org or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Staff Recommendations: 

Taiany Goulart, site manager, Wayside Medford

How to Be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X Kendi

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Carlton, Wayside DEI consultant 

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Jodie Nierintz, senior program director, Wayside Milford

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fredrick Mann, Wayside clinician 

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More by Janet Mock. “Mock’s Story of growing up in California and Hawaii as a low-income trans girl of color.”

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. “Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health.”

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. “This book looks at the ways we do harm by failing to understand one another, a problem Gladwell investigates through the child-abuse scandal involving Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the deceptions of financier Bernie Madoff and the TV, and more.”

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald. “This book explores hidden biases that we all carry from a lifetime of experiences with blind spot cover social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality.”

Other recommendations: 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez 

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in The Cafeteria by Beverly Tatum 

On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case For Hope by DeRay Mckesson 

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