Community Healing

In recent years, the United States has seen a growing awareness of the legacy of slavery and its enduring impact on our society. In the wake of that collective reckoning, many institutions began taking meaningful steps toward acknowledging harm and investing in racial equity.

Progress is rarely linear. Today, truth-telling has become controversial, and repair has been politicized. But the need for healing has never been greater.

This is where the Foundation’s third pillar takes root. While dialogue is a vital step on the road to healing from an unjust past, it is primarily about connection and proximity: between Descendants and Jesuits, between people and places, between history and the future we want to create together.

We create spaces built for honesty, enabling Descendants to speak about their lived experiences aloud, sometimes for the first time in a room full of willing listeners. When Jesuits sit in these curated spaces, they do not defend or debate — they learn and reckon with their inherited legacy. From that practice, understanding deepens, relationships form, and accountability becomes personal. Most important, the distance between Descendants and Jesuits — once defined by silence — begins to close.

Healing also happens when we invest in the systems and structures that shape daily life. That’s why our work under this pillar may sometimes reach beyond those originally harmed, and that is by design. Our programs might take the form of rebuilding a community asset, repairing infrastructure, or supporting programs that benefit entire neighborhoods — because that’s what it takes to restore the environments where Descendants live, work, and carry forward their legacies. If others benefit in the process, that’s not a compromise. Instead, it illustrates the fact that we are all one human family and can only rise when we rise together.