One Love Global

One Love Global (OLG) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization with a mission to transform communities so Black children experience justice, peace, healing, opportunity, and abundance. OLG invests in youth organizing and community leadership development to build the individual and collective power needed to transform policies and practices. OLG is the place lead for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) of Metro Lansing and has hosted teams for all five pillars with our deepest work being cross-cutting to center youth and education across the pillars. Our work over the past four and half years has centered on the needs and priorities of communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic while supporting non-BIPOC community members to be effective allies. We have worked with youth and adult allies to transition our programming to be engaging and interactive in a virtual space which has expanded our reach throughout Michigan. We also launched the Center for TRHT as a physical space in Lansing to serve the state of Michigan in our centrally located 4600 square foot space. The space is ideal for socially distanced gatherings.

The pandemic coincided with our TRHT theory of action to bring directly impacted people together with allies to co-create a collective community vision of what racially equitable policy and practice looks like after an intentional period of orientation, onboarding and relationship-building within each sector. One Love Global and TRHT partners launched the Lansing People’s Assembly in May of 2020 as a dedicated space for innovation, community co-governance and transformation across TRHT pillars. Significant outcomes of our TRHT pillar work include: 1) partnership with the Ingham County Prosecutor which has led to substantive changes in prosecutor policies and the formation of a Michigan People’s Assembly, 2) resolutions declaring racism a public health emergency were passed by the City of Lansing, the Ingham County Board of Commissioners and the Governor of the State of Michigan as a direct result of collaboration with public health professionals to host a series of webinars and press conferences on the impact of the pandemic (coinciding with a global uprising in support of racial equity) on Black communities, 3) ongoing community healing circles including teacher circles have been increasingly in demand given the stress of the pandemic, 4) Peace & Prosperity Youth Action Movement members (ages 12-25) prioritizing healing and mutual aid as pandemic interventions and desiring to learn how to keep circles with their peers, and 5) creation of a social entrepreneurship pathway for Lansing youth in partnership with Lansing Area Economic Partnership.

The HOPE opportunity database is a vital tool that can help our communities answer a question we have been asking since there was such resounding affirmation that racism is indeed a public health emergency laid bare by the disproportionate impact of the pandemic in Black and Indigenous communities. One Love Global has contributed to our County Health Improvement Plan with a focus on violence prevention through economic opportunity and would be a champion for all of the HOPE indicators in the upcoming plan update. Another way we would leverage the HOPE opportunity, asset and goal-oriented framework is organizing our community around key shared indicators for healthy youth development through age 25. One Love Global launched a racial equity scorecard in 2021 as one of our TRHT goals with the purpose of providing data-driven tools for action. Incorporating HOPE database indicators on the social determinants of health will strengthen our capacity to advocate for the policy and practice transformation needed to meet communities’ need for racial equity and healing with meaningful and measurable action.  The recent launch of our Transform Michigan podcast on Michigan Business Network will provide a platform for promoting the HOPE indicators and organizations across Michigan who are doing promising work to transform policy and practice.

In addition to our core programming focused on youth organizing and leadership development, One Love Global provides backbone support for Black liberation movement organizations. Our backbone support work has inspired us to build an infrastructure for civic engagement, digital organizing and grassroots advocacy that can put HOPE data in the hands of our people in urban, suburban and rural communities as we continue building upon a base of over 40,000 supporters in Michigan. Our experience in grassroots organizing for policy and practice transformation is an asset we would be honored to share with the HOPE peer-learning community.