Meet MOSES President Saundra Brown
By Pam Gates
Saundra Brown became MOSES president at the beginning of 2024. She has a strong vision on how to strengthen MOSES and next steps to move it forward. She recently shared her visions and goals with the MOSES newsletter team.
Frequent one-on-ones between MOSES members are important! “We’re not communicating with one another enough,” Saundra says. “I want to put an emphasis on one-on-ones. You can’t have too many. Even if you’ve done one with someone, it’s good to do another. You can always learn something new about someone. This is very important to me.”
How can we grow MOSES? “There are so many issues,” Saundra says. “We need more faces of the people impacted the most, Black and brown people. There aren’t enough of the people who are re-entering the community in MOSES. Why? Are we intentionally reaching out in specific areas of our communities? Is our outreach compelling? I am leading an effort to reach out to African American churches.”
Saundra started this effort with a visit by the MOSES executive committee to her church, St. Paul AME, on Sunday, April 21. All the visits involve a group of five to ten members of MOSES, e.g. the Fundraising Team, the Communications Team, task forces, etc., attending a Sunday service at an African American church. The visits include a 10-15 minute presentation of an overview of MOSES, along with an invitation to become a member of this great organization called MOSES. Saundra plans to contact pastors of other African American churches in Madison, to arrange visits to their congregations on upcoming third or fourth Sundays.
What has happened to the Individuals Caucus? “It recently came to my attention that the Individuals Caucus is no longer functioning. I have asked James Morgan, our community organizer, to facilitate its re-establishment.”
We need shorter meetings, and fewer of them! “That results in better take-aways,” Saundra says. “Meetings are necessary, but distributing a well planned-out agenda that makes clear the core issues we seek to address a few days before the meeting, insisting that participants are prepared to discuss topics on the agenda, and starting and ending on time all make an effective meeting. When holding a meeting longer than one and a half hours, we stand the chance of the people losing interest and forgetting most of what was said after the first 45 minutes of the meeting. Fewer, shorter meetings result in better quality time.”
Let’s participate in the Juneteenth celebration on June 15 at Penn Park! “I’d love for MOSES to make signs and march with them in the parade. I also want to do tabling. We need a tablecloth with the MOSES logo, plus materials about MOSES on the table. We also need people to sign up to table, to make signs, and to march in the parade, which starts at 10 a.m. at Fountain of Life Church on Badger Road [about ½ mile south of Penn Park]. Please see the sign-up opportunity elsewhere in this newsletter.”
Ed.: It’s on page XX.
Training for MOSES members: It is one of my goals to implement more MOSES, WISDOM, and Gamaliel training and to follow up on those trainings with a strategic plan of action. I believe it is important to become knowledgeable, but to move the knowledge into the realm of action is even more important. There are no plateaus in the work of MOSES. We never stop learning, because the world never stops teaching!
There is a Gamaliel training coming up in July in Eau Claire. Gamaliel trainings are useful and well organized. Their goal is to make their trainees stronger. Everyone that goes comes away with some positiveness toward their work in the community. It is important that every MOSES member attend a Gamaliel training.
Saundra has a very busy life outside of her MOSES commitments. She works hard for her church, St. Paul AME (African Methodist Episcopal), and she tutors children, both privately and at One City Schools. She is also the director of Saturday Scholars, a Saturday-morning program funded by 100 Black Men and housed at Creekside School in Sun Prairie. The program, for kids in grades K-5 who are one to three grades behind, emphasizes reading, writing, spelling, and math. There are three lead teachers, each of whom has an education assistant; the child-to-teacher ratio is 4:1. Saturday Scholars, which is completing its third year, has a spring and a fall session. It uses a University of Florida Science of Reading (SOR) program for its reading instruction.
Saturday Scholars is supportive to the students’ families, too. “We provide computers to parents,” Saundra says, “and we try to meet other needs if they let us know – if they’re not too proud.”
In her earlier career, Saundra taught in Madison public schools. “I retired due to Act 10. I didn’t know what it was going to do to my retirement,” she says. But Saundra can hardly be said to have retired!
Concluding remarks
“I want to be able to empower people with an understanding that the issues we’re encountering today are a rapid act of genocide,” Saundra says. “Our kids are dying. Our people are dying. If I haven’t done everything I could to eradicate the unjust systems that were put in place many, many years ago, then my life has not been worth living. I want to accomplish as much as I can during my tenure as president of MOSES, and in any other group that I am engaged in, to dismantle the unjust systems that have been put in place to cause harm to the lives of my brothers and sisters.
“As your president, I am looking for support and constructive criticism. [If you make suggestions,] let me think about them, then follow up with an honest and meaningful conversation. I’m more soulful than political; I think about the souls of people and their intentions.”
Every time she facilitates a MOSES meeting, Saundra starts it with the MOSES mission statement, because it speaks to the intentions of our work:
Our mission is to build collective power to dismantle the systems of mass incarceration and mass supervision and to eradicate the racial disparities in our community that contribute to them. We envision an end to the systems of mass incarceration and mass supervision; an end to systemic racism; a reallocation of resources to create racial and economic equity: a just society without discrimination in which all people thrive.
The agenda to achieve all that may involve a lot of political work, but it is, first and foremost, a statement of soul. It illustrates the soul of MOSES, and, as well, the soul of our president, Saundra Brown.