And she deserves some help.
Memphis Lift executive director Sarah Carpenter was part of the potent interchange between parent-choice activists and U.S. Sen. and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren last month in Atlanta about the public sector, power and systems, and the poor and society, an edited transcript of which The Giving Review featured last week. With her fellow activists who protested Warren’s education plan and that which it would do to gut charter schools, Carpenter and her fellow activists on the kind of inspiring “pilgrimage” about which co-editor Dan Schmidt admiringly wrote here yesterday.
Carpenter is on an unfortunately growing list of principled black women dissed by progressives and their policy proposals. The list includes Milwaukee’s Polly Williams, Cleveland’s Fannie Lewis, and the District of Columbia’s Virginia Walden Ford, subject of the uplifting new movie Miss Virginia.
Carpenter herself was the subject of a great piece later last week by EducationNext’s Ira Stoll. It’s worth the read. Givers, along with those who comment on giving—of whom there are many, including us—should perhaps take particular note of part of her American story. It hardly conforms with a narrative of powerful “dark-money” moguls being behind some charter-school conspiracy.
As Stoll reports, “To pay for the six-hour bus-ride to bring 60 parents from Memphis to the Warren campaign event in Atlanta, ‘I asked everybody that I knew for money, and nobody wanted to fund us for this trip,’ Carpenter told” a podcast interviewer. “‘Somebody put $12,000 on their credit card. Thank God that we got the money to pay them back.’”
At this writing, A Gofundme campaign for the Powerful Parent Network to pay for the transportation has generated just less than $19,000 from just more than 162 donors toward a $25,000 goal.