Spotlight On

Mission:
Operation Understanding DC’s mission is to build a future generation of community leaders who will work to eradiate racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination, and to promote respect, understanding and cooperation within their communities.

Background:
Increasing evidence demonstrates that individuals of different persuasions cannot relate to each other. This inability to connect breeds fear and insensitivity. OUDC enables a community to overcome America’s most pervasive and long-standing social ills: bigotry and discrimination.

OUDC's year-long program is based on a model which posits three steps to eradicating discrimination: education and dialogue, which leads to a change in behavior, and, ultimately, a change in attitude. OUDC fosters an environment that takes students through these steps during the year. All of the retreats, seminars and events are designed to encourage a dialogue that forces students to scrutinize and modify their own behavior and thoughts. The intense experiential learning that occurs during the programs, especially the summer study experience, is the catalyst for modified behavior to turn into life-altering empathy and thus a change in attitude.

Thus far, more than 200 students and families have directly participated in the award-winning program, and, through outreach efforts, over 25,000 students and adults have participated in fulfilling an overall goal — the elimination of all forms of discrimination.

Current Programs:
OUDC’s program begins in January of a student’s junior year of high school. During the first six months of the program, students participate in workshops, meetings, lectures and activities, learning about the religions, histories, and cultures of the African American and Jewish communities. They build the trust necessary for true understanding through honest introspection and interaction, experiential learning and time in each other’s homes, most notably for Passover seders and Easter. This part of the program is based on the Sankofa/Never Forget principle: without a firm grounding in the past, we cannot move forward.

The second phase of OUDC’s program is the summer study journey to cities and towns in the U.S. of significance to both the African American and Jewish communities, where the young people visit key sites and meet with the leaders and foot soldiers of the many movements for equality, both past and present.

Highlights include:

• Traveling for more than three weeks to New York City; Greensboro and Charlotte, NC; Atlanta; Birmingham, Montgomery, Tuskegee, and Selma, AL; Meridian, Philadelphia, Utica, Jackson, Greenwood and Oxford, MS; and Memphis.

• Visiting communities as distinct as the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Boro Park in Brooklyn and Greenwood, MS, former Cotton Capital of the World.

• Speaking with past and current Civil Rights trailblazers, such as Chris McNair, father of the youngest 16th Street Baptist Church bombing victim, Denise McNair; Joe Levin, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Rev. Samuel Kyles, who was with Martin Luther King, Jr. during his last moments; as well as rabbis, Holocaust survivors and members of dying Jewish communities.

• Shaping understanding by crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL, site of 1965’s Bloody Sunday; visiting the site of the 1960 Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro, NC; seeing the last Orthodox synagogue in Mississippi, Ahavath Rayim; standing at the balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; and meeting with fellow young leaders at many stops along the way.

• Worshipping with Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jewish; Baptist and Pentecostal; and Muslim congregations.

The third part of the program starts in September with a weekend retreat during which students learn from professional mediators how to facilitate discussions on diversity and race among their peers at schools, and for a wider audience of church and synagogue congregations, and community and youth organizations. After this retreat, students take an active role sharing the ideas and lessons they learned in OUDC with the broader community.

OUDC recruits twenty-four African American and Jewish students from all over the Washington, DC metropolitan area to participate in the program each year. Students must demonstrate leadership potential, curiosity, maturity, and commitment to their community, as well as excellent communication skills. The selection process includes a written application, two recommendations, and personal and group interviews. The students attend a variety of public and private schools in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area and come from a wide range of economic backgrounds. There is no charge to students for this program, and they are selected without regard to financial status.

Funding Needs:
OUDC provides students with a year-long journey toward self-discovery and civic responsibility at no cost to them – and on a shoestring budget. (The largest expense is the three-week summer experience, which costs just under $50,000, and includes travel, lodging and meals for the 24 students and group leaders.) General operating support is vital to the ability to educate students about the value of strong self identity and of diversity, and to provide an important service to the local community through prejudice-reduction workshops.

The "Spotlight On" highlights the activities of a different 501(c)3 nonprofit organization serving the Metropolitan Washington, DC community. The selection of organizations for the "Spotlight On" is based on criteria such as programmatic interests, geographic focus, and size, to ensure the broadest possible representation of the region's nonprofit sector.

If you'd like to see your NPO in the "Spotlight," e-mail a description of your organization, following the above format, to dclibrary@foundationcenter.org, with "Spotlight Submission" in the subject line.