Our Mission
What is CommonBondz?
CommonBondz is a not-for-profit organization focused on educating what drives racism and bias against African Americans. We address what are the different forms of racism, what is meant by white privilege, and what collaborative steps whites and African Americans need to take as a community to drive change.
Our Action
Our approach is unique from many others. Our founders are two very different looking people (one middle-aged white male, the other a black female) who have very similar values and beliefs. Our actions and learnings are built on establishing strong and sustained individual and group communication channels which foster open dialogue and sharing of feelings and perceptions, as well as the ability to ask questions, in a safe environment. We hear real life stories from African Americans on living in a racist society, and from whites on what they see and understand. We focus our dialogue on listening and questioning in a respectful manner. Our education is to understand these situations from the lens of those being discriminated against and collaboratively work on solutions on how to reduce racism from occurring.
We provide various forms of educational learnings to support the topics we are addressing through Videos, Books, Articles, Community Forums, Guest Speakers, Presentations, and Monthly Newsletters. We also provide an individual partnership/mentoring program where African Americans and Whites can learn and help each other in a more personal way. Each of these are important, and will help reinforce the learnings we get and the most important actions we must take, hearing from those impacted first hand.
We recognize that we are different, and our goal isn't to make everyone the same. Our goal is to understand and recognize people’s differences and help create a society where differences are respected and appreciated. We will create the environment to have the uncomfortable conversations. We may not agree with each other at times, but where we may not have similar opinions and beliefs, we should not be treated differently because of them.
We hope you will join us in addressing the issues we have, and be a voice for helping drive fairness and equity in our society. While we are different, we all have a mind, a heart, and a soul. Understanding and celebrating our differences to form CommonBondz is the greatest education we can give ourselves. We look forward to your participation, openness, insight and action, and learning from you.
We See, We Learn, We Respect, We Celebrate each other.
How did we get the name CommonBondz?
Common means occurring or done often. Bonds are a force or feeling that unites people; A shared emotion or interest. Our goal is to establish a sustained program where people unite with the emotion and interest to address racism against African Americans and drive change to create a fair and equitable society.
Why Bondz with a Z?
The energy represented by the letter Z resonates with the ideas of organization, peacemaking, business, and efficiency. The letter also resonates with the idea of being realistic. It can be diplomatic.
Using Z as the last letter indicates initiatives are likely to have decisive endings, endings consistent with what was envisioned when the project was launched.
Our motivation is to drive education and awareness of racism against African Americans in an organized, peaceful, diplomatic and efficient manner. Our goal is to use our education to drive social and systematic changes that will result in greater fairness and equity for African Americans where current racism occurs.