By Dr. Kirk Adams
Executive Director, The Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion
https://i4sdi.org
What We Inherit—and What We Must Build Next
On September 1, we launched the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion.
The launch came one week after the death of Dolly Parton and one day after the death of Wendell Berry. Then, two days later came the news that Gloria Steinem had died.
Three remarkable lives. Three profoundly different voices. Three people who, each in their own way, helped bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
And now they are gone.
I confess that I feel some tension writing about three white people in connection with a Coalition devoted to expanding diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging.
We must never tell the history of social justice as though progress has been bestowed upon us by a handful of famous white people. The long struggle for freedom has been led, sustained, and repeatedly rescued by Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, immigrants, workers, and countless others whose names may never appear in a history book.
Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem were not perfect. None of us is. Nor were they the sole authors of the movements with which they became associated.
But each demonstrated something important about how people can use their gifts, influence, resources, and voices in service to others.
Dolly Parton: Building Belonging Through Books, Music, and Love
Recently, my wife, Ros, was listening to Brittany Packnett Cunningham’s podcast in our kitchen. I overheard Brittany say something to the effect of:
“I’m going to have to have a talk with the Grim Reaper. You are taking the wrong people. You are taking the wrong white people!”
This was after Dolly Parton’s death but before we lost Wendell Berry and Gloria Steinem.
Brittany went on to reflect on how Dolly made music for everyone and consistently supported people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
Dolly possessed the rare ability to reach across many of the boundaries that divide us. Her music welcomed people in. Her warmth made people feel that they belonged. She publicly supported LGBTQ+ rights, affirmed the Black Lives Matter movement, invested in a predominantly Black Nashville neighborhood, and used her visibility to make room for people whom much of the country music establishment had overlooked or excluded.
Her most transformative legacy, however, may be found in the hands of children.
Created in honor of her father, who could not read, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has given hundreds of millions of books to young children. Dolly once said:
“If I’m remembered 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books.”
I understand the power of that legacy in a deeply personal way.
On my bookshelf are several dozen children’s books containing both print and braille. They came through Braille Tales, a partnership between the American Printing House for the Blind and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. The program enables blind and low-vision children, and sighted children and their blind grownups, to share accessible books as families.
My four-year-old grandson and two-year-old granddaughter know that when they want Grandpa to read them a story, they must bring me a book with braille in it.
Recently, my granddaughter brought one of those books to me and said:
“Grandpa, read book with your hands!”
That is Dolly Parton’s legacy in my home.
A little girl understands that her blind grandfather reads differently, and that different is perfectly natural. She does not see an obstacle. She sees another way to share a story.
That is inclusion.
That is belonging.
That is love made practical.
The American Printing House for the Blind continues to make this family experience possible through Braille Tales.
Wendell Berry: Caring for the Corner Where We Stand
Wendell Berry influenced me in another way.
As a writer, poet, farmer, environmentalist, and cultural critic, he reminded us that community is not an abstract idea. It is a daily practice rooted in how we treat the people, creatures, land, and institutions closest to us.
Berry wrote:
“The community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health.”
That conviction has long shaped my own philosophy: brighten the corner where you are.
We can and must confront national systems of injustice. But we must also examine what is happening in our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, congregations, families, and community organizations.
Who is being heard?
Who is being overlooked?
Who is welcomed through the front door but excluded from real influence?
Who has knowledge and talent but no pathway to leadership?
Berry taught that we do not heal in isolation. We heal through relationships, responsibility, reciprocity, and care for place.
His life asks us a stubborn and necessary question: What are we doing with the particular corner entrusted to us?
Gloria Steinem: Opening Doors and Listening to Women
As a husband, father, brother, colleague, and friend, I am profoundly grateful for Gloria Steinem’s work to advance the freedom, dignity, safety, and leadership of women.
Steinem helped expose discrimination that society had normalized. She co-founded Ms. magazine, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and other organizations that changed public conversation and expanded women’s political and cultural power.
Importantly, she also understood that leadership is not about asking younger people to imitate those who came before them.
When asked what advice she would give young women, she said:
“Listen to yourselves, not to me.”
What a remarkable instruction for an elder and a leader to offer.
Do not become a copy of me.
Do not wait for my permission.
Listen to your experience. Trust your voice. Organize around the realities of your generation.
Steinem described herself as an “entrepreneur of social change.” She understood that movements require more than admired personalities. They require organizations, networks, stories, resources, relationships, and pathways through which people can exercise power together.
That is precisely the kind of infrastructure we must build now.
Inheritance Is Not Enough
We can honor these three lives without placing them at the center of every struggle or overlooking the generations of diverse leaders who fought beside them, challenged them, taught them, and made broader movements possible.
Honoring our elders does not mean placing them on pedestals.
It means carrying the work forward.
We are living through a generational transition. Many leaders who shaped the struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are leaving us. Their deaths create grief, but they also create a responsibility.
Who will step forward?
Who will mentor them?
Who will fund their ideas?
Who will give them room to lead. Not someday, after waiting patiently for a seat at the table, but now?
Too many organizations say they want younger and more diverse leaders while continuing to concentrate authority, visibility, relationships, and resources in the same hands.
We cannot develop the next generation merely by inviting young people into the room. We must share power, provide meaningful opportunities, listen to their analysis, invest in their growth, and remain open to being challenged by them.
Mentorship must also be mutual.
Established leaders have experience, history, relationships, and hard-earned lessons to share. Emerging leaders bring new language, new tools, new cultural understanding, new forms of organizing, and questions that institutions desperately need to hear.
The goal is not to pass an old torch unchanged.
The goal is to build a larger fire together.
This Is Why the Coalition Exists
The Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion is committed to working with, mentoring, supporting, and learning from the next generation of social justice champions.
We want to connect people across race, disability, gender, generation, affectional orientation, culture, profession, geography, identity, and lived experience.
We want experienced leaders, emerging leaders, reluctant leaders, and people who have never imagined themselves as leaders.
We need elders who are willing to share what they know without controlling what comes next.
We need younger people willing to question our assumptions, stretch our imaginations, and create approaches we have not yet considered.
We need people from historically excluded communities to exercise real influence, not serve as decorations in someone else’s vision of diversity.
The Coalition is a place to exchange resources, develop new ideas, mentor and be mentored, organize, advocate, build relationships, and transform isolated individual effort into collective power.
Connect. Learn. Act. Together.
Every generation inherits unfinished work.
Our responsibility is to honor what came before us, repair what was broken, preserve what remains valuable, and create smoother pathways for those coming next.
Become a Founding Member
We are building this Coalition right now, and we need you.
Do not stand on the sidelines and wait for someone else to protect inclusion, equal opportunity, belonging, social justice, human rights, and human dignity.
Bring your experience.
Bring your questions.
Bring your relationships.
Bring your imagination.
And bring someone from another generation with you.
Join the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion as a Founding Member:
Join the coalition as a founder
https://community.i4sdi.org/coalition-founder
Founding Membership is available for a limited time at:
$25.99 per month
$239.88 per year, equivalent to $19.99 per month
Honor-system membership for students and people who are unemployed is available at:
$15.99 per month
$119.88 per year, equivalent to $9.99 per month
No application. No paperwork. No requirement to prove that you belong.
We trust our community.
Save the Date
Please join us for the in-person Launch Celebration of the Community Coalition for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion:
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
5:30–7:30 p.m.
Parkview Event Space—Sanctuary Room
200 8th Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98109
Come ready for community, connection, celebration, and joy.
Help Us Build What Comes Next
Membership is the most important way to sustain the Coalition.
If you would also like to make a tax-deductible contribution, our GoFundMe campaign supports the Coalition’s online community, mobile apps, accessibility, programming, and member resources:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-our-fight-for-inclusion-human-dignity-for-all
Learn more about the Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion:
Dolly Parton showed us that a book placed in a child’s hands can open a world.
Wendell Berry showed us that healthy lives require healthy communities.
Gloria Steinem showed us that movements grow when people listen to their own voices and to one another.
Now the work belongs to us.
Let us honor those who came before by opening doors for those who are coming next.
Let us resist fear, division, isolation, and hate.
Let us build relationships across identities and generations.
Let us make room.
Let us share power.
Let us become the ancestors that future generations will be proud to claim.
Together, let’s build what comes next.
Kirk Adams, PhD
Executive Director
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion
www.i4sdi.org
We can’t wait to see you at the next workshop.
Until then, please share this post with anyone you think would be interested.
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