CADRE ‘s vision and orientation are rooted in the eruption of South Central Los Angeles in violence following the April 29, 1992 acquittal of police in the brutal and caught-on-tape beating of Rodney King, an unarmed African American man. After decades of disinvestment, over policing, and police brutality in South Central, the violence played out over property and material goods, costing Black and Brown lives.  Co-Founder Maisie Chin, at UCLA at the time and in a moment of political awakening, decided that she did not want to perpetuate the dominant economic system and culture that pits people of color against each other in support of unbridled competition. She chose at this point to work for multiracial solidarity and unity as a form of resistance, and as a way forward to a new paradigm.

Maisie began working in 1993 for an education improvement initiative that sought to increase collaboration between South Central K-12 schools and their closest community college, with the goal of increasing college graduation.  The first and primary cluster of schools Maisie worked with was in Watts, with not only the backdrop of the 1992 uprising but also a historic gang truce that gave promise to community-led violence prevention with the leadership of the most impacted.

And within a few years the dream, like so many previous, would be deferred. Teachers and administrators involved in the improvement effort stopped Maisie outside of meetings to express violent, dehumanizing beliefs about students. One white teacher invited her to agree with him that all the children at the high school were “monsters.” Maisie’s goddaughter had this same teacher, who summarily failed everybody in the class except for one student, and repeatedly dehumanized the students with inexcusable references to wanting to violently punish them. South Central parents had no access to observe let alone counter this belief system when it mattered.

This blatant contradiction between talking about equity, and not connecting it to the implicit bias, outright racism, and dehumanization undermining equity’s prospects behind closed doors in the classroom, led Maisie to believe that we fundamentally cannot improve educational outcomes in our society without challenging the structural racism in our public schools. And this was not just reserved for the students.

South Central administrators and teachers also complained repeatedly about Black and Brown parents not showing up to meetings, answering a phone call, or returning a form. A clear contrast to Maisie’s growing up as a child of Chinese immigrants, with a mother who went to night school while her father was laid off, and who ultimately spent years on the graveyard shift and did not attend a single parent-teacher conference after third grade, Maisie and her brothers were never denied an opportunity to learn because of a racist perception that her family did not care about education. It was clear to Maisie at that point how stereotypes of Asian families were being used to perpetuate anti-Black racism, with life-altering benefits to families like hers, to her own trajectory.

Perceptions of parents play a huge role in determining how schools respond to students they deem to be “challenging”. Maisie started working on the modest idea that parents could be at the table to turn these perceptions on their head by sharing their wisdom and knowledge of their community, their children, and themselves. That’s how CADRE initially was envisioned – seeing the parents and the community, not just children and youth, as assets to be developed through leadership and collective power building, which would one day ideally redefine South Central LA schools and their relationships with the families whose attendance and blind trust in the education system creates their livelihoods.

Conventional wisdom says that if you involve yourself as a parent of color, you should be able to foster a better education for your child. The unspoken rule and reality, however, is that you must never challenge schools or call out any of their practices as racially discriminatory. Backlash and labeling of parents as “problems” ensue.

Maisie then met and worked with Co-Founder Rosalinda Hill through a community project based in Watts. “Linda” was a parent with five kids who completed every district workshop, conference, and training offered to parents. She was the parent liaison at her children’s school and buffered the interactions between administration and the parents. Yet her son, who was in second grade and in special education, still got locked in a closet as a form of discipline.

As a person of both African American and Mexican heritage who was born in Mississippi and raised in Ohio, Linda was a survivor of racism and Black-Brown tension, and very passionate about challenging people’s perceptions about Black boys in particular – she had four sons and a daughter. Linda envisioned a “movement of thousands of powerful parents.” She realized that despite the years of her involvement as a parent volunteer, she had never been trained to be a leader-organizer, someone who could bring parents together as advocates for their children.  She resigned from her position at the school.

Seizing on this new vision, Linda started organizing parents with whom she had built relationships through her school and school district organized parent involvement, and she and Maisie met during the week to plan and outreach. Maisie and Linda started meeting with 5-10 South Central parents every Friday night in her and her husband Kenny’s living room, and then other parents’ living rooms for two years.  Over potluck dinners, Kenny giving parents rides, and letting parents’ children come, a small group of “core leaders” – including Kenny – shared stories about their experiences in schools as well as their pasts and their lives with their children, with absolutely no judgement. There was freedom and respect for honesty and wholeness – anything and everything mattered. It easily became clear that there was so much more to parent engagement than school committees, trainings, and services – that was not going to build the skills and power for parents to change their realities.

At Linda’s suggestion, she and Maisie later began door-knocking and conducting parent surveys – ten blocks each around Locke, Washington, and Crenshaw High Schools. The surveys asked parents what parent power meant to them, what they would change if they had it. And the stories – there were so many stories of parents being alienated and disengaged due to how schools treated them or handled their inquiries and complaints. The severed relationships between parents and schools was more than apparent, and the manner in which tensions — including those between African American and Latino families — were being dismissed and unacknowledged was only making matters worse. This was the common thread in all the stories.