Dear Members, Partners, and Community:

 

There is something sacred about returning — not as a visitor, but as a steward, called again to the work you helped begin. When I founded the African American Strategic Partnership more than a decade ago, I did so from a place of urgency, conviction, and an unshakable belief that our community deserved a table it had helped build. Today, I return to this presidency with all of that same conviction — deepened by years of listening, leading, learning, and, yes, being humbled — and I am honored beyond measure to stand in this space with you again.

 

This is not a ceremonial welcome. It is a call. It is an invitation into the work. And the work has never been more necessary.

 

What Time Has Taught

When I stood before this membership the first time as its founding president, the landscape looked different. The language of equity was finding its footing in policy rooms. Kinship care was still fighting for basic recognition in child welfare systems. The intersection of race and institutional response — in courts, in clinics, in schools, and in community was discussed in hushed tones more often than in bold policy proposals. We have made progress. But progress, as we know, is neither linear nor permanent.

 

What time has taught me is this: strategy without relationship is hollow, and relationship without accountability is sentiment. The African American Strategic Partnership exists precisely because our community requires both — the rigor of data-informed strategy and the warmth of authentic, trust-centered connection. Coming back to this presidency, I bring with me a deeper appreciation for what those two things together can accomplish, and a sober clarity about the urgency of this moment.

 

The Landscape We Inherit — and the Work Before Us

Let us speak plainly about where we are.

 

Child Welfare. Black children in Allegheny County — and across Pennsylvania — continue to be disproportionately represented in child welfare systems, removed from homes and families at rates that reflect not the deficit of our families, but the deficit of systemic imagination. The research is consistent and the testimony of our families is clear: kinship care — placing children with relatives and extended family — produces better outcomes, stronger permanency, and healthier children. Yet kinship families remain underserved, undercompensated, and underestimated. We know, from the work of scholars like Dr. Robert B. Hill and from the documented strength of our own community, that Black families have always been the first responders for our children. Our advocacy must match that truth.

 

Juvenile Justice. Far too many of our young people are entering the deep end of the juvenile justice system for behaviors that, in other communities, are handled with compassion and community-based support. Zero-tolerance policies, school-based arrests, and the overrepresentation of Black youth in detention are not accidents — they are the products of systems that have not yet been held to account. The African American Strategic Partnership must be a voice, and more than a voice, a force for diversion, restoration, and reinvestment in our young people's futures before the system forecloses those futures entirely.

 

Mental Health. The mental health crisis in our community is real, and it is layered. It is the weight of generational trauma, of economic instability, of the relentless labor of navigating systems designed without us in mind. Black Pittsburghers face significant barriers to mental health care — from access and affordability to the shortage of culturally competent providers who look like and live among our families. We cannot afford to treat mental health as an afterthought. It is foundational to every outcome we seek, in child welfare, in justice, in education, and in economic vitality.

 

Deep-End Systems. Whether we are speaking of long-term care, adult protective services, systems that intersect with homelessness and housing instability, or the compounding effects of incarceration on families — our community continues to bear a disproportionate burden in what are called 'deep-end' systems: those that engage families only after circumstances have reached crisis. Our strategy must push the intervention point upstream. Prevention, early engagement, and community-rooted support are not soft approaches. They are smart ones, and they are ours to champion.

 

Leadership for This Moment

I do not take lightly the weight of this mantle. Leadership in this moment — across our community, across systems, across political and cultural divides — demands emotional intelligence as much as strategic clarity. It demands the capacity to hold pain and possibility in the same hand. It demands humility before our elders and boldness before those who would diminish what we are building.

 

I come to this presidency committed to leading with my full self: as a woman who grew up in Pittsburgh and carries this city in her bones; as a practitioner with decades of work in child welfare and kinship care; as a scholar who believes data and lived experience must occupy the same room; and as someone who understands that no leader — no matter how credentialed or determined — accomplishes anything alone.

 

Partnership is not a strategy. It is a posture. It is how I lead, and it is what I believe the African American Strategic Partnership was built to embody.

 

What I Am Asking of You

I am asking our membership to engage — not in the passive sense of receiving information, but in the active, generative, accountability-laden sense of being partners in a shared project. I am asking our institutional allies to move beyond performative commitment and into structural change. I am asking Pittsburgh's leaders — in government, in philanthropy, in the nonprofit sector, and in the faith community — to recognize that the health of this city is indivisible from the health, agency, and opportunity of its Black residents.

 

And I am asking our community to trust — not blindly, not without expectation, but trust grounded in relationship, in consistency, and in the demonstrated willingness to show up even when it is hard.

 

Together, we will advance a strategic agenda built on equity, dignity, and accountability. We will be present in policy conversations, at legislative tables, and in community spaces. We will amplify the voices of families navigating systems that were not designed with their liberation in mind. And we will refuse to accept that disparity is the permanent condition of Black life in Pittsburgh.

 

This Moment Is Ours

More than ten years ago, a group of visionaries said: we need something different. We need a partnership rooted in our community's strengths, driven by our community's wisdom, and accountable to our community's future. That was a bold declaration then. It remains a bold declaration now.

 

I am honored to lead it again. I am grateful for every member, partner, and community advocate who makes this work possible. And I am certain — as certain as I have been about anything in my professional life — that what we do together in the years ahead will matter long after this moment has passed.

 

Welcome. Let us get to work. 

 

With deep respect and renewed purpose,

 

Dr. Sharon L. McDaniel, PhD, EdD, MPA

Founder & President

African American Strategic Partnership

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