Black students in Washington are often taught from curricula that center other people’s stories, educated inside systems whose interests and values were not built to invest in their well-being, their holistic identities, or their meaningful success.

And yet, steps from their classrooms, on the same blocks where their schools sit, are elders who have done the work: organizers, educators, spiritual leaders, public servants, scholars, craftspeople, and artists whose heritages, histories, and lives are themselves curriculum. But their wisdom is not archived. Their stories do not fit inside the state’s learning standards. That is a disservice to our community, and it is not conducive to the intergenerational stewardship this moment in our nation requires. When a generation of Black elders carries its stories out of the community uncredited and unrecorded, what is lost is cultural inheritance and resilience knowledge itself.