Exerpt from Oprah Daily – A longtime grassroots organizer and activist in her home state of Mississippi, Cassandra Welchlin—executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, a nonprofit advancing the economic security of women by training them to be civically engaged and empowering them to become transformational leaders, and cofounder of the Mississippi Women’s Economic Security Initiative, which seeks to improve the economic well-being of Mississippi’s women and their families—is used to getting knocked down professionally. But she never gets knocked out.
In fact, for Welchlin, getting back up to fight for the Black and brown faces she represents is her only option, particularly since those faces remind her of the two women who raised her. “I often say my mother’s life taught me what justice was, and my grandmother’s life taught me what service was,” she says.