For our tenth annual Affordable Homeownership Summit, we are returning to in-person! Hundreds of leaders, policymakers, lenders, and advocates will convene to envision and protect thriving neighborhoods for low- and moderate-income homeowners, exploring innovative solutions and best practices from work on the ground to policy at the highest level.
This year’s Summit is focused on Breaking Barriers, Building Opportunities. We will focus on the numerous barriers on the path to homeownership and the solutions and policies needed to create and sustain equitable and affordable homeownership opportunities. Events will include….
Sign up today to join us on October 30, 2023 at Convene Midtown, 117 W46th St. A discount is available for early sign-ups before September 15th with code EARLYBIRD!
Meet our Keynote Speakers
Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s African American music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes “Black Culture and History Matter” (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding black cultural institutions, “American Needs a Better Reparations Plan” (Bloomberg News), and “The Queen Mother,” a look at the life and legacy of black nationalist and reparations advocate Audley Moore (Vanity Fair magazine). She and William A. Darity, Jr. are the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics and Business, and the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. His most recent book, coauthored with A. Kirsten Mullen, is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020).
Mullen and Darity co-produced Ways and Means Presents “The ARC of Justice: From Here to Equality” podcast series, 2021, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, and North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC. The Alliance for Women in the Media Foundation conferred the 2022 Gracie Award for Radio Local Honorees on the podcast, and it also received the 2022 Salute to Excellence Award, Commentary and Discussion, from the National Association of Black Journalists.
Together with Lucas Hubbard, Mullen and Darity coedited The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice, a volume of working papers written by members of the Reparations Planning Committee, a collective of scholars and public servants. The Black Reparations Project is a comprehensive report that addresses major issues relevant to the design and implementation of a plan for reparative justice for black American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States.
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century is the recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Book Award, Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility, American Sociological Association; the 2021 Lillian Smith Book Prize; the 2021 Inaugural Book Prize from the Association of African American Life and History; the 2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Non-fiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; and the 2021 Best Book Awards (Social Change Category), American Book Festival.