Planned Parenthood of Greater New York Celebrates One Year of Reviving Radical

One year ago, we gathered with community to speak truth to power at Planned Parenthood of Greater NY’s Reviving Radical — Truth and Reckoning convening. The gathering was the third in a series of events that launched our Reviving Radical framework, created to reckon with our organization’s legacy and transform our relationship with communities of color.

Radical Truth: Truth and Reckoning convening was co-created with Black Women’s Blueprint and overseen by our community and respected reproductive justice and advocates leaders. The gathering centered the voices of our patients and community members who offered powerful testimonies and a vision for how PPGNY can begin repairing our relationship with communities of color. After the convening, we synthesized what we learned, validated our understanding with community and publicly committed to the Reviving Radical Community Mandates. PPGNY has made a public commitment to an intentional, mission-critical process to center equity, especially race equity, across our programs, services, and internal operations.

Here are some of the initiatives that we have undertaken:

• We launched an Equity School, an internal racial and social justice training initiative for all staff. To date, we have engaged 130 staff in Equity School. Equity School is a mandatory for all new staff.
• We began reckoning with Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger by removing her name from our Manhattan Health Center, disavowing her support for eugenics and committing to Reviving Radical Community Mandates and organizational transformation.
• We launched a bilingual Reviving Radical Website where community and supporters can track our progress implementing the Reviving Radical Community Mandates.

Who knew that the world would change so dramatically in just a year? Who knew COVID-19 would turn into a global health pandemic, taking the lives of over 260,000 Americans and drastically altering the lives of millions more, especially people of color, exposing the scourge of medical racism, economic injustice, and structural inequities within health care systems? Who knew that during this pandemic, the country would explode in protest over the deaths of unarmed Black people, calling on city and state governments to defund the police? While the world has changed and new challenges have arisen, the work of Reviving Radical that we committed to continues with vigor and necessity.

To learn more, visit the Reviving Radical website.