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Protecting Dreams
MANIFESTING FUTURES
Creating Champions
15 years of experience championing for the Hood & urban youth!
Our Founder & Managing Director
Ocean Novae Anuru, LMSW, MPH
A Champion for The Hood & Liberation
Welcome to DKC!
I am a young Black Woman Hood Scholar with enough life experience to be an elder.
I used to be named Rebecca after my mother, who I lost at 2 days old, and my paternal grandmother, Ruby. I renamed myself Ocean Novae many years into my personal healing process. I am grateful to belong to a long line of powerful women.
I want Black liberation everyday.
I have made it my life's work to combat and raise awareness about the systemic challenges that Hood Black youth and communities face throughout the United States. We are actively surviving genocide and I will never be silent about the systems that are trying to kill us in so many ways.
I am a Survivor.
I was once a displaced young person battling abuse, rape, sexual assault, grief, poverty, upheaval, chaos, and chronic stress. Very happy to have gracefully survived and be on the healing side! Can't have the thriving without the surviving, I'm grateful for all the lessons. I openly live with Complex PTSD.
I love the Hood.
I especially love Hood Black kids and youth.
They are my center.
I love them even when the world lies and tells them they are less than and unworthy.
I was a Hood Black child born and mostly raised in The 'Boogie Down' Bronx aka BIG BRONX nowadays, but I owe some years to metro-Atlanta, hence the accent switch so randomly!
I also have loving relationships with Philly & Detroit.
I love Hood Black people and our culture with every fiber of my being. The swag, the music, the fashion, the strategy, the language, the rules, errthang.
I do mean I love us.
I've had to navigate a lot of spaces and institutions that openly disregard Hood Black folks.
I am unapologetically committed to being my full self in every space I enter.
I proudly have letters after my name to show Hood Black youth they are and always will be worth the investment of time, intention, energy, and resources.
I'm a learner and a writer at heart.
I've been teaching for as long as I've been learning.
I believe in the value of everyone but uplift the marginalized. I always will.
respect
& Protect
the
hood!
Dream Keep is the manifestation of many dreams I've kept, and some of those I almost lost. I dream of days where Black folks can live deeply & profoundly without being oppressed simply for existing.
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Our name is inspired by Langston Hughes' poem, The Dream Keeper.
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I am actively imagining a world that is safe for Black youth and the adults they grow to become: this dream deserves protection from the "too rough fingers of the world."
DKC is meant to be a lush garden to grow and explore new ways of being, while being honestly grounded in the process - the struggle, the werk.
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One of the reasons I created Dream Keep was to help hold organizations that
claim to serve Black Hood youth well accountable.
I intentionally do not use language like "underserved" or "at-risk" because in practice they tend to pathologize people that are making due with what they have been given;
instead preferring systems-accountable language such as "underinvested" communities
and people "choosing life by resisting oppression."
Thank you for bearing witness to one of my biggest dreams.
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