How Jazmine Foxworth & The 431 Exchange are transforming generational inequality
When Jazmine Foxworth was young, after elementary school every Thursday, she and her mother would head straight to New Orleans’ Norman Mayer Library on Gentilly Boulevard. As they rode down Elysian Fields Avenue, a thoroughfare lined with oak trees, “My heart filled with excitement thinking about all the new books I’d be taking home with me that day,” says Jazmine.
Inside the library, a beige, two-story building with tall windows, Jazmine’s mom taught her “about the books she enjoyed reading growing up and that defined her experience as a black woman.” Books like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and works by Iyanla Vanzant.
“I’m so thankful for my experience with her and all the lessons that I learned from her inside that library,” says Jazmine.
Jazmine, 27, is one of The 431 Exchange’s 2020–21 scholarship winners. After completing a four-year degree in communications at Louisiana State University, she is currently in a three-month accelerated program for software engineering through the New Orleans nonprofit Operation Spark. Hardworking, committed, determined, Jazmine exemplifies the best of what we’re trying to do at The 431 Exchange: help deserving students complete their education, attain economic stability and pass it on.
The racial wealth gap persists today, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War. According to historian Calvin Schermerhorn, as reported in the Washington Post, “The typical black family has just one-tenth the wealth of the typical white one. In 1863, black Americans owned one-half of 1 percent of the national wealth. Today it is just over 1.5 percent for roughly the same percentage of the overall population.”
You can support students like Jazmine:
Jazmine’s goal is not solely to create economic security for herself. “My educational journey is setting me up to pass the torch on to anyone who comes after me and make life easier for the generations that follow,” she says. “I want them to have the opportunity to pursue what they want to do in life.”
After college, Jazmine worked in marketing and then moved to a tech company as a project manager. There, she saw the racial wealth disparity up close. Out of a staff of roughly four hundred people, only about ten were Black. “I didn’t encounter a lot of people from my background because people from my background don’t have exposure to that industry,” she says.
“That disparity alone was enough for me to realize there aren’t enough people of color” in tech, Jazmine says, which is one reason why she chose to pursue software engineering. “It’s also a field that allows people to make a decent salary. I’ll be able to build generational wealth for myself and my future family, and help them create generational wealth for one another.”
At The 431 Exchange, we’ve had the privilege of meeting countless students like Jazmine who are living the African proverb “Each one, teach one,” meaning when you advance in life, it is a sacred duty to take people with you. Our scholarships are helping students pay for books, tuition, meals and school fees that academic scholarships don’t cover.
Would you help us continue to help students like Jazmine with a donation? One hundred percent of your tax-deductible donation goes to students; none to administration. You can give today by going to 431exchange.org/donate.
Our nonprofit was founded to continue the educational and civil rights legacy of New Orleans’ Adult Education Center. The Center was a little school with a big mission: It helped Black women integrate the largest corporations in America as secretaries, and those jobs provided them with a level of economic stability they had never experienced.
Adult Education Center graduates reuniting in 2019
Like Jazmine, the Adult Education Center’s graduates were keenly aware they were on a mission to transform not only their lives but that of their descendants. Your donation today can do the same for students of color in our time. In addition, these students are working hard to surmount the logistical and emotional challenges of the pandemic and stay on track with their studies.
To donate, please go to 431exchange.org/donate. 100 percent of your tax-deductible donation goes to students, none to administration. Thank you!