As parents in the Durham community heard about the organizational transformation at the initial school where PAAC was founded, they wanted to know how they could make similar changes at their school. One of the founding moms, Jovonia Lewis, began to support other parents with capacity-building tools and organizing strategies designed to raise awareness and advocate for equitable opportunities and outcomes for their schools’ children.
Parents began to organize across the District with regular meetings, host community educational workshops, and brought demands to school board members. As they gained strength in numbers, they applied for grants and received local funding to increase equity in their individual schools. In 2019 with funding from Z. Smith Reynolds EPiC was created to continue the work of organizing PAAC initiatives and other capacity-building opportunities for historically marginalized parents. We knew that to create sustainability, we needed to broaden our impact to all schools and to accomplish deep-rooted, systemic change we needed to address and name racial inequities, that take into account the historic context of educational racism, and have the tough conversations necessary to create a climate and culture that is conducive to all children’s success.