Today we are working to launch a new site for Washington Community Action Partnership. Washington State Community Action Partnership works to build healthy communities and eliminate poverty through a unified network of Community Action Agencies across Washington State. Community Action believes ending generational poverty and inequity is the right thing to do and that together, we can summon the moral and political will to invest in healthy, just, and sustainable communities that can stabilize and equip our neighbors living in poverty to exit poverty for good.
Community Action Agencies are nonprofit and public groups funded by the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), a federal program that allocates funding to states to combat poverty across the United States. Initiated in 1964, Community Action comes out of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and from the advocacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
One of our traditions on MLK Day is to listen to one of his speeches. Today, we were led to a speech given at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967 titled, “What is Your Life’s Blueprint?” In it, King describes that life is like a building and when buildings are built well, an architect is employed to create the blueprint for it first. Only a well thought out plan, a plan with integrity, will bring forth good work.
In speaking to the students that day, King asked the children what their blueprint for life might be and offered three suggestions for the students to consider.
“Number one in your life’s blueprint should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth. And always feel that your life has ultimate significance.”
Never be ashamed of who you are… and King was speaking directly to the children to never be ashamed of the color of their skin. He expanded on this later to implore, "Don't allow anyone to pull you so low, as to make you hate them.”
“Secondly, in your life’s blueprint, you must have as a basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor....If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. Sweep streets like Beethoven composed music. Sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. And sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.’”
Find your life’s work, and then be the best at it. He continues and references Ralph Waldo Emerson who said “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” This feels true today more than ever in a world where technology can be leveraged to manifest reality, good and bad, with astonishing speeds.
Yet, what guides work? What motivations should be behind your efforts to be the best?
“And finally, and finally, in your life’s blueprint, must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice....However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live. You have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody. And so you must be involved in the struggle of freedom and justice.”
In life and in the work that we do, the guide needs to be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. We have a responsibility to do work that seeks to make our nation a better nation, one that strives to make life better for everybody.
At Parallel, we are imperfectly striving to embody what King is speaking about. We strive to be the best at what we do but in the service of the principles beauty, love, and justice. We build better software for the public good. We want to do that like Shakespeare wrote poetry. We want our work to make our society better for everybody.
