Pictured above: Dr. Shere Walker, Executive Director of Black Parents United Foundation (BPUF)
Dr. Shere Walker’s daughter, Lauren, was three years old when she had her first asthma attack.
“I remember she was making this wheezing sound, but no one in my family had asthma, nor did I have any experience treating asthma, so I didn’t know what it looked like. And then I remember she fell to the floor, and she was starting to shake a lot. I called the Children’s Hospital, and they said, ‘Get her to the hospital immediately. Sounds like she’s having an asthma attack,’” recalls Dr. Walker.
Lauren was diagnosed with Reactive Airway Disease (RAD) but was being treated like an asthma patient. Later, she was diagnosed with asthma and has been receiving treatments for almost 15 years.
It was a few years after receiving her asthma diagnosis when Dr. Walker met Lucy Molina, a local community organizer, that she found out she wasn’t alone.
Her story was one of many in her neighborhood, and she would soon learn that her daughter’s asthma diagnosis was likely a product of the zip code she lived in and the air she was breathing.
“I never knew how much the system was working against me and low-income folks until I started those conversations with Lucy,” said Dr. Walker.
Dr. Walker had always been dedicated to supporting her community. Volunteering her time and using funds from her cleaning business, she started the Black Parents United Foundation in 2019 with a mission to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion through confidence-building, community development, and community engagement. As the executive director, she leads the nonprofit to enable community members to own and drive the creation and implementation of solutions for the challenges they face, and policy decisions that directly impact them.
A couple of years after starting the Black Parents United Foundation, Dr. Walker met Molina at their local church. Molina is a mother of two and has always worked hard to support her family, often working multiple jobs to do so. But her hard work and passion extend beyond her family. “I’ve been a frontline community organizer for many years just trying to bring justice to the Black and Brown folks in my community,” said Molina.
Molina has become well-known for her environmental justice work in Commerce City — one of the most polluted cities in the United States. When she learned that the smell in the air and the industrial waste she was exposed to daily were contributing to her family’s and neighbors’ health issues, she made it her mission to educate and advocate for her community. “I always say, where the problem is, lies the solution,” said Molina.
Molina shared her experience with the systemic and racial inequities her family faced living next to an oil refinery and introduced Dr. Walker to the concepts of environmental justice and environmental racism. “Nobody had ever mentioned it to me, and I was a teacher at the time,” recalls Dr. Walker. “Lucy gave me some examples about what it looked like, and it dawned on me — I was one of those people being impacted, and here I was, leaving the Mississippi Delta for a better life, and I went right back to the same situation.”
Combining their backgrounds as educators and advocates, Molina joined the Black Parents United Foundation team as the environmental justice committee chair. Together, Dr. Walker and Molina expanded the organization’s programming to include environmental justice and health equity initiatives.
“We want to keep moving forward, and we can’t do the work without our donors and The Denver Foundation.”
- Dr. Shere Walker, Executive Director of Black Parents United Foundation (BPUF)
In 2022, under its environmental justice work, the Black Parents United Foundation organized a group of community members to develop an air quality policy to reduce pollution across Aurora, Denver, and Commerce City, ultimately providing its community with healthier places to live, work, and play. Members of these communities wrote and advocated for the policy agenda to ensure it aligned with their priorities and needs.
“After all the training, all the meetings, all the research, all the homework, and all the typing, we all cheered at the end because we had written a community-led policy, specifically around the issues that we wanted to see,” recalls Dr. Walker. The Black Parents United Foundation is in the next phase of this work, meeting with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to implement its policy agenda. It has also added a youth leadership training program that educates and empowers young people across the local school districts in Aurora, Denver, and Commerce City to help lead the charge for environmental justice.
Like Dr. Walker and Molina, the organization continues to develop community leaders who are educating and organizing individuals to pursue their rights and well-being. Working at the Black Parents United Foundation has been more than just a job for Molina. “I’m not only empowering myself; I’m empowering my community, moving together forward, not leaving anybody behind,” she says.
With the support of The Denver Foundation and its donors, the Black Parents United Foundation can better provide services and support to disproportionately impacted low-income and communities of color in Denver, Commerce City, and Aurora toward a more empowered, healthy community that can advocate for large-scale change.
The Denver Foundation has been supporting the Black Parents United Foundation for two years as a Community Grants Program grantee, which is the foundation’s signature funding strategy supported by our permanent endowment. Black Parents United Foundation has also received support from the Technical Assistance Fund, and the Black Resilience in Colorado Fund, a fiscally sponsored project of The Denver Foundation, in addition to several independent fundholders.
Photos courtesy: Armando Geneyro