Keynote Address

by Imari K Paris Jeffries, Ph.D, President and CEO Embrace Boston

Imari K. Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., is the President and CEO of Embrace Boston, where he is leading a citywide racial equity transformation through The Embrace monument, the Embrace Center, and ongoing community organizing efforts. Imari brings a wealth of experience from the nonprofit management, racial equity, community activism, education reform, and social justice sectors and has served in executive roles at Parenting Journey, Jumpstart, Boston Rising, and Friends of The Children. He currently serves as a Trustee of the UMass System, UMass Global, Mass Humanities, Boston Ballet, the Huntington Theatre, GBH Advisory Board and former Governor Baker's Black Advisory Commission.

Most recently, he was the Executive Director of Parenting Journey with other leadership stints as Chief Executive Officer of the Italian Home for Children, Chief Operating Officer of Jumpstart, interim CEO of Boston Rising, and Executive Director of Friends of the Children-Boston. Imari has extensive professional experience in public, national, and nonprofit leadership and has supplemented his work with volunteer service on boards. These have included Jumpstart, the African American Federation of Greater Boston, Save the Harbor, Save the Bay, the Elizabeth Peabody House, the Massachusetts Mentoring Partnership, the Edward Brooke Charter School, The Providers Council, and Third Sector New England.

Imari was recently named one of Boston’s most Influential Bostonians by Boston Magazine and the Boston Business Journals Power 50. He is a four-time graduate of UMass Boston and received his Ph.D. through UMass Boston's Higher Education Program in June 2023. An Army veteran, Imari served from 1991-1996. He currently lives in Hyde Park with his family.

Performance by Shaw Pong Lui , Violinist, Composer & Teaching Artist

Musician and community-builder Shaw Pong Liu (she/her) facilitates dialogue and healing through listening-based creative collaborations. From playing music in wintry bus shelters, to inviting people to share their “songs from home” and migration stories, to creating sidewalk Chinese calligraphy play spaces, Shaw Pong seeks to connect people to one another through embodied creative practices. As City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016 she created Code Listen, a five-year project collaborating with mothers who’ve lost children to homicide, Boston police officers, and teen artists to share stories and create original music together. Code Listen also filled concert halls, city streets, and Boston’s City Hall with musicians and memorial portraits of loved ones lost to homicide, raising community consciousness of the inequitable impacts of violence on our city. Shaw Pong is a violinist, erhu player, and composer who performs, teaches and foments musical justice uprisings in the Greater Boston area. She performs with groups including the Silkroad Ensemble, Sonic Joy, and Soul Yatra Trio, and her compositions have been commissioned by Silkroad Ensemble, A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, Anikaya Dance Theatre, Community MusicWorks, Hub New Music and the Celebrity Series of Boston. Liu is a 2018 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Boston Celtics’ “Heroes Among Us” honoree.

SPOKE ART

We are an artist founded and artist run organization. Supporting and collaborating with artists of all disciplines and maintaining the role of artists as facilitators in culture, is central to our work. We use the power of making art to triage critical needs of the communities we serve that are confronting addiction, immigration, systemic racism, police youth relationships, stewardship of our natural world, HIV/AIDS and/or human trafficking. Our work is to seek focus, fairness, and balance. Our goal is to continue to use art and the act of creating together to define a brave new normal and shape a shared future history where each of us has a voice, where each of us is included, where each of us is listened to, where each of us is loved

YOU MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

CREATING A SHARED FUTURE HISTORY OF BELONGING