A Gathering of Leaders-A #ThrowbackThursday Reflection

This week I attended with my mayor, several other councilpeople, local foundation leaders and other civic and educational leaders this year’s CEOs for Cities National Meeting in Nashville. That experience took me back to this moment:

tumblr_lmlbpvYDqS1qi7y8z

This is my first major panel session, at CNU 19 in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014. I organized this group and this session on “cultural” urbanism with my fellow panelists Payton Chung and James Rojas, each to speak on how their ethnicity and their culture, as well as mine, influences how we built things.

The amazing thing about this week’s conference is that I saw a very diverse room, on and off the main program. We saw diverse programs. Some of us saw community services in action, in a community center designed to reflect the primary cultures served. More on that in a future post.

This post is part of my participation in #NaBloPoMo, the time of the year when bloggers come together to pump out daily content and connect. Find out more about that project and how I’m participating, here and here.

By Kristen Jeffers

Kristen Jeffers has always been interested in how cities work. She’s also always loved writing things. She went off to a major state university, got a communication degree and then started a more professional Blogger site. Then, in her graduate seminar on urban politics, along with browsing the urbanist blogosphere, she realized that her ideas should have a stronger, clearer voice, one that reflects her identity as a Black southern woman. And with that The Black Urbanist blog was born. Seven years, one Twitter account, one self-published book, two podcasts and a litany of speeches and urban planning projects later, here we are.