Honoring Black Women's Work: Creating a Parent and Caring Adult Community to Support Youth STEAM Engagement

Leveraging Black Feminist Thought (BFT) as a framework for parent engagement and using testimonial authority as our research method, this paper describes how meaningful interactions were intentionally fostered among Black and Latinx parents in the Digital Youth Divas Program (DYD), a STEAM program designed for Black and Latina middle school girls. Specifically, the DYD's Community Relations and Engagement Manager (CREM), a Black woman and community resident, describes how she navigates local power structures that impede parent and youth participation in STEAM opportunities by creating a sustainable parent community with strong social capital and effectively communicating with parents in inclusive, culturally relevant ways that build trust. Her experiences highlight the multiple roles Black women play in transforming their communities to address issues of equitable and just access to quality informal learning opportunities as an act of resistance to historical inequity. Moreover, by highlighting her success in building a community of support for Black and Latina girls in STEAM, we argue that it is important for learning initiatives to leverage the power of Black women as change agents in their communities through equal partnership, proper compensation, and recognition of their contributions to STEM enrollment, persistence, and retention.