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Protecting Dreams

MANIFESTING FUTURES
Creating Champions

Over a decade of experience championing for hood & urban youth!

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Our Founder & Director
Rebecca Ruby Anuru, LMSW, MPH

A Champion for Hood Youth

Welcome to DKC! 
I am a 30 year old Hood Black Woman Scholar with enough life experience to be 60.
I am known as a community Mother or Auntie given the day. 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 face throughout the United States.
 
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 - sometimes surprised - to have 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 and Depression.

I 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. 
I was a Hood Black child born and mostly raised in The Bronx, 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 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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