Join Us! Children’s Defense Fund Child Advocacy Institute Deaconess Community, Twenty-six years ago, Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund, envisioned the Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy Ministry at Alex Haley Farm as a space for community providing spiritual sustenance to endure the journey of creating the just world our...

Deaconess Foundation envisions a community that values the health and well-being of all children and gives priority attention to the most vulnerable. This community only thrives if the allocation of power and distribution of resources, benefits, opportunities, and burdens are not predictable by, nor predicated on race. This vision and recent events have called us...

Funding Will Support Racial Justice Movement in St. Louis June 11, 2020 Deaconess Foundation, Forward Through Ferguson, and Missouri Foundation for Health have collaborated to establish the St. Louis Regional Racial Healing Fund to invest in healing community trauma and changing the conditions that reinforce systemic racism. With a matching grant from Robert Wood Johnson...

by Rev. Dr. Starsky Wilson On April 14, when St. Louis was under shelter-in-place orders due to COVID-19, Walter Johnson, a Missouri native and professor at Harvard University released a new book. Weaving national taproots from the slave trade and Indian Wars through the police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., the text is entitled The...