Washington State Coalition of African Community Leaders

Who we are:

Founded in 2017 by a handful of small grassroots African led and serving non-profit organizations to support sharing resources and building trust across communities.

Today, we have grown to nearly 200 African diaspora led and serving non-profit organizations, businesses, and individual members that are committed to building a sustainable African Village in the Northwest, so that the African Diaspora can be empowered and thrive. 

What we do:

Our core services include providing audio/video in language and outreach services in over 33 major African languages, which was selected as a core service after surveying our community leaders and discovering that all of our community members received their information via audio/video clips from trusted messengers on social media platforms.

Thru our language and outreach services, we have been able to exponentially increase civic engagement rates in the Evergreen African communities from everything from the census, elections, vaccination rates, COVID-19 translated materials, COVID-19 financial assistance, accessing immigrant resources, scholarships, job acquisition, leadership participation in community/city civic engagement programs, and marketing/leadership development for both youth and current leaders. Unlike most translation services, our outreach specialists don't just translate materials; they share their translated materials across their combined social media outreach of over 140,000 community members across the state. 

Our Youth & Leadership training

We have also exponentially grown a culturally appropriate intergenerational youth program based on the African village model that includes community leaders, parents, and youth that is led by one of the original five co-founding members of WSCACL's youth program, WSCACL’s Youth Coach Ezana Yassin. Today, WSCACL's Youth Program, the Evergreen Environmental Justice Youth warriors includes 22 youth ages 7 to 18 years old from seven different African communities that reside in Snohomish, King, and Pierce counties. 10 of the youth are youth leaders that support co-facilitating the program. We have a waitlist of over 25 youth interested in joining the program. Our youth are an integral part of decision making in their programming and in subgranting training and decision making. Leadership is best taught by giving youth a seat at the decision making table and not in a classroom.

The Cause:

In 2022, we received generous support from Seattle Foundation's Neighbor 2 Neighbor (N2N) and an anonymous individual donor to support a pilot partnership African diaspora cultural & heritage program with Rainier Valley Leadership Academy (RVLA). Both WSCACL & RVLA youth learned about African diaspora culture, history of Africa and African American music evolution, and African recipes. Our community leaders and cooks shared the meaning behind the recipes they shared, stories about their childhood, youth and attendees asked questions, and everyone enjoyed tasting different cuisines across the diaspora. The youth asked that we create an e-book to showcase all of the delicious recipes as we recorded and transcribed the recipes. WSCACL's Culture & Heritage committee set a goal to create an e-book of the Easy African Recipes to showcase the different cultures, share about the traditions and ingredients of the dishes, and create a sustainable revenue to support WSCACL Culture & Heritage year-round round events showcasing our diverse cultural dances, food, and artistic talents.

We are asking for your support today to help us fund WSCACL's Culture & Heritage e-book, WSCACL's Culture & Heritage's Easy African Recipes that will be co-designed by the youth and community leaders. The funds raised will go toward youth and cook stipends, commercial kitchen venue, editor consultant, e-book author, nutrition consultant, insurance, photographer/videographer, book promotion and advertisement, and travel expenses for youth/cook book tour. No donation is too small. 90% of the proceeds from the e-book sales will go to creating a sustainable stream of revenue for WSCACL's Annual Culture & Heritage program and pay our artists and youth stipends to encourage learning and teaching cultural and traditions of the Diaspora and sharing their talents with their fellow Washingtonians.