Thursday marks the end of Black History Month.
The Bend-Redmond Habitat for Humanity, the Good Deeds Project and Bend YIMBY hosted an event Wednesday evening, honoring and acknowledging contributions of Black people throughout history.
A telling and powerful Netflix documentary titled “Explained | Racial Wealth Gap“ was featured.
The three organizations also took the opportunity to bring awareness to systematic challenges.
They focused on issues related to race and inequality – specifically highlighting housing discrimination on the High Desert, and what they’re doing to stop it – like ‘racially biased covenants’.
Riccardo Waites, founder of C.O.B.L.A. (the Central Oregon Black Leaders Assembly), said: “Racially-biased covenants are promises that you will not sell the property to anyone who is not white. We’ve only done a soft search in Deschutes County and found almost 200. There was some pushback from the county clerks of Oregon for financial reasons, and they didn’t want to affect history. The process would be us informing homeowners that they had them, using the link to download all the legal paperwork they would need. Your neighbors are here, and we’re part of the community and we want to belong.”
Carly Colgan, CEO of Bend Redmond Habitat for Humanity, said, “Because of fair housing law, we’re not able to kind of differentiate one group from another. What we’ve done is spend the time listening to under-represented communities and really taking those things to heart to make our program accessible to everyone in the community.”
Bend Redmond Habitat for Humanity, Bend YIMBY and the Good Deeds Project all say two of their goals are: to keep the underprivileged informed, and advance Black homeownership.
Originally Published Here: https://ktvz.com/news/bend/2024/02/28/as-black-history-month-comes-to-a-close-we-continue-to-close-the-racial-gap-of-disparity/