Martin Luther King, Jr’s speeches guide LEAF’s partnerships and shape our mission.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech (1963), King declared, “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” he spoke to the heart of LEAF’s purpose. Today, Black Americans face a 5:1 imprisonment rate compared to white Americans. ¹ This statistic motivates us to partner with the TLE Center for Urban Entrepreneurship.
The TLECFUE is a non-profit that trains returning citizens in personal care and cosmetology trades to help access job placement and licensing. The program opens paths toward business ownership for people rebuilding their lives after incarceration. LEAF is supportive as a resource for the program and its entrepreneurs.
King’s words, “We cannot walk alone,” reflect LEAF’s commitment to partnerships building an ecosystem of shared ownership. LEAF works with organizations rooted in communities that have executed the Civil Rights Movement’s work. Our clients include the Bay State Banner, a local newspaper that has written about the Black community since 1965, the Movement’s earliest days; MathTalk, founded by Omo Moses, the son of Civil Rights Activist Bob Moses. MathTalk extends the work of the Algebra project by bringing math to life for kids.

When King spoke of mobility from “a smaller ghetto to a larger one,” he pushed us to think beyond surface changes. At LEAF, this means creating systems for economic mobility through business and home ownership.
King called for moving “from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” LEAF answers this call by building economic frameworks that support business ownership in communities that have faced barriers to wealth creation.
Finally, King’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” (1967) speech reminds us why we need to do this work together. “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it…Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life?… There is no deficit in human resources, the deficit is in human will…The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty.”
We are grateful to have you working with us! (And if you have reached this blog’s end, you are with us!)
Listen to or read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in full
¹A. Nellis, “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” The Sentencing Project (2021), https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparity-in-State-Prisons.pdf; W.J. Sabol and T.L. Johnson, “Justice System Disparities: Black-White National Imprisonment Trends, 2000 to 2020,” Council on Criminal Justice (2022), https://secure.counciloncj.org/np/viewDocument?orgId=counciloncj&id=2c918083835fc0e8018361f02fe6001a; R. Subramanian et al., “A Federal Agenda for Criminal Justice Reform,” Brennan Center for Justice (2020), https://www.brennancenter.org/media/7083/download; M. Mauer and N. Ghandnoosh, “Incorporating Racial Equity Into Criminal Justice Reform,” The Sentencing Project (2014), https://www.safetyandjusticechallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/incorporating-racial-equity-into-criminal-justice-reform.pdf.