A recent panel at the Mary Baker Eddy Library included Tenacity’s President and Founder, Ned Eames. The excerpt below is from the Library’s fall newsletter:
Facing Down Slavery: A Contemporary Story
On Tuesday evening, September 29th, The Mary Baker Eddy Library hosted a program on the issue of slavery in contemporary society. Three prominent humanitarians and activists spoke about the challenges and the promise of facing down conditions of oppression and entrapment. Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, MD, described her work in confronting literal practices of enslavement in the African country of Sudan through the organization My Sister’s Keeper, which she co-founded in 2002. Ned Eames discussed how Tenacity, the organization he found in 1999, is helping Boston youth overcome the fetters of low expectations and lack of opportunity due to an inadequate public school system and other hampering social conditions. Rev. Kaia Stern, PhD, explained her work in supporting transformation and healing to those caught in what she described as the “crisis of mass incarceration” in the United States. Stern directs the Pathways Home project at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School.
The interchange between the panelists alternated between political, sociological, and theological considerations. Eames questioned the ability of schools in Boston, and elsewhere in the United States, to educate effectively under current policies. “How do you educate 60,000 kids in a system here in Boston…when the leaders of individual schools are not empowered to choose their own staff? he asked. “It’s not a performance-based system…Organizationally, we have to empower the leaders of these schools to do great things.”
