The Dallas Mavericks — in partnership with the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, Milwaukee Bucks, Sacramento Kings, and Indiana Pacers, along with the WNBA’s Dallas Wings, Minnesota Lynx, and Indiana Fever — hosted the Team Up For Change virtual summit on Oct. 21.
This was put in place to unite, activate, and inspire a shared commitment and call for social justice and racial equality.
… The Mavericks contributed to Team Up For Change with inclusion ambassador Chris Arnold hosting a panel of four community leaders from the Dallas-Fort Worth area on the importance of civic engagement, and on voting on both the local and national levels. That panel included Akilah Wallace, Veronica Torres Hazley, Elizabeth Henneke, and Xavier Henderson.
Wallace is the executive director of Faith in Texas, which is a non-partisan multi-racial multi-faith grassroots movement of people united in values working together to achieve economic, racial and social justice for all people. She spoke about the role institutions of faith can play in everyone’s right to vote in the upcoming election while in the midst of this pandemic.
“My first recommendation is for people of faith — our clergy and other institutions of religion and spirituality — to first just allow healing spaces and the opportunity for people to just be able to feel seen, to feel heard and that they can have space to just breathe,” Wallace said. “People are experiencing a lot of loss in this pandemic — they’re grieving.
“They’re grieving the loss of people, they’re grieving the loss of ideas that they had for this year, they’re grieving the loss of plans that they may have had. That on top of the heightened divide that our nation is feeling is creating all types of mixed emotions that people are holding. So it’s really important that our religious leaders, our spiritual leaders, as well as just everyday people who are leaning into whatever their core value system may be, that they one, create opportunities for community engagements, but also spaces where you don’t have any expectations.”
Excerpted from Mavs.com. Read the full article here.
