“Where I come from, elders are not segregated or marginalized. First- and second-generation elders have specific, highly-esteemed leadership responsibilities that no one else in their community can hold.”
ABOUT MISTINGUETTE
Mistinguette Smith helps people give birth to big ideas. By day, she is principal consultant at M Smith Consulting, which helps grantmaking foundations collaborate to make deeper and more effective social change by advancing racial and gender equity.
She is also the founding director of the Black/Land Project, which gathers stories about Black people’s relationship to urban, suburban and rural land and turns them into tools for Black self-determination and organizing.
By night, she writes essays about race, land and kinship that have been published in academic and literary journals, and environmental anthologies. A Buckeye by birth and peripatetic by disposition, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and Oberlin, Ohio.
You can read all of Mistinguette’s work at www.mistinguettesmith.com.