Dear Members of the Georgetown University Community:
I write today to share an announcement regarding our work in Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation—the launch of the Georgetown University Reconciliation Fund.
The Reconciliation Fund represents a new stage in our work to understand and respond to our University’s historical role in the enslavement of people of African descent and fulfills a commitment we made to our community in 2019, following an undergraduate student referendum. This new Fund is inspired by the leadership, engagement, and service demonstrated by so many of our students and members of our University community over these past few years.
Through the Reconciliation Fund, Georgetown will provide $400,000 each year to support community-based projects that aim to benefit Descendant communities whose ancestors were enslaved on Jesuit plantations in Maryland. Over these past few months, a new student-led committee, the Reconciliation Fund Student Awards Committee, has been working alongside a Descendant Advisory Committee to develop the Fund’s application process, which launched today. The Student Awards Committee will work with the Descendant Advisory Committee to review the applications that are submitted and will recommend projects to the University for funding.
Earlier this year, as we were preparing for the launch of this new Fund, we reached out to the Georgetown alumni community for their support and received contributions from more than 500 alumni and members of our community in support of the Fund.
I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the students, Descendants, alumni, and members of our community whose efforts have enabled us to reach this moment.
I encourage you to read more about this important new initiative on our website.
We have an ongoing and enduring responsibility to reckon with our past, with the injustice of slavery and its persistent and enduring manifestations today. This is a moral imperative that defines this moment in our nation’s history and our work as a University. We began this process as a University community seven years ago, with our Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (2015-2016), and by offering a formal apology in 2017 for our institution’s complicity in slavery. These steps represent the beginning of a journey. Along the way, our colleagues at the Georgetown Slavery Archive, in our Department of History, and at our Library, have helped us to understand more about our history, and our engagement with Descendants has enabled us to understand more about how we can respond in the present. Many more efforts—across the disciplines and across our community—have sought to deepen what it means to address our history in this moment.
The Reconciliation Fund is an important next step in our continuing work.
Sincerely,
John J. DeGioia