This is Part 3 of a four-part series centering on Penny Franklin’s Changemaker Journey.  In this portion of our conversation, Penny focuses on the “Patchwork” quadrant of our Changemaker Framework that emphasizes the beauty and importance, as well as the challenges, of working across cultures and human diversity to address the issues we must face together.



































As she ponders the patchwork in the Changemaker Journey, Penny begins by reflecting on recollections from her childhood.
“I was born in ‘58 so some of my early years were watching the black people in the community work through the Civil Rights issues and seeing white faces.  At that time this didn’t register with me, but I knew that there were people out there and I heard names who were talked about in the community as being ‘allies’ who helped move things. So, I’ve always understood that we don’t do things alone. When you live in a community where the population of African Americans is so small, the mindset can be one of helplessness, or not understanding how you bring about change. You fear the ability to survive among all these white people. You don’t want to mess that up.”
Because her mother wasn’t raised in the South, Penny grew up without some of the same assumptions placed on her about limitations and expectations.  The “rules” were there, but she wasn’t taught that she had to simply accept them. She also spent most of her early life in a community surrounded by white people in school and on athletic teams. Her family home was over the hill in the county separated from what she calls the “typical black community.” There was no choice but to interact with white people since she was geographically separated from the black community in town.
“So, I tell people I was almost 40 years old before I realized what it really meant to be black because I had just assimilated into the white culture. There were black kids who called me ‘Oreo’. I had to ask one of my white friends.  Was it the same thing as being called ‘Uncle Tom’ or something? Because I had never heard that expression before and I had to have a white person tell me…’  I was seen as a little different from some of the folks in the African American community.”
Later on, when The Community Group was first formed, it was considered to be a mostly African American civic organization.
Our goal was to work with all the other African American organizations and the churches to help monitor the governing bodies and to kind of be a clearing house to say, ‘This is what’s going on here.  This is what’s going on there.’  We planned to get folks from the other organizations to send a couple of members so that we could take turns so it wasn’t a big burden on just a small group of people to get engaged and to understand what was going on in the community.
After several years of trying hard to engage for change primarily within the African American community, the group decided their work wasn’t having the impact they needed. They began to adjust their tactic.