Black Labor in America: Emerging Opportunities Amid the Economic Crisis

Steven C. Pitts PhD is the co-author of Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty and other reports detailing the state of work in the black community. In 2006, he initiated the C.L. Dellums African American Union Leadership School in order to improve the skills of unionists interested in linking the labor movement and the black community.

In addition to being a grantee of the Open Society Institute Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Pitts is the lead on a two-year project, funded by the Ford Foundation, designed to improve relations between blacks and Latino immigrants in the workplace.

Shawn Dove joined the Open Society Institute in May 2008 as manager of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. He has more than two decades of leadership experience in youth development, education, and community building.

Dove served as one of the founding directors of New York City's Beacon School movement in the early 1990s while working with the Harlem Children's Zone. As creative communities director for the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts he led a national initiative that partnered community schools of the arts and public housing communities in 20 U.S. cities.

As New York vice president for Mentor/National Mentoring Partnership he initiated a strategic response to the lack of African American and Latino male mentors for New York City's boys by creating a public awareness and recruitment initiative called The Male Mentoring Project.

In 2006, Dove founded Proud Poppa, a publication for African American fathers and is a co-founder of Harlem Men Stand Up, an empowerment project that holds quarterly summits in Harlem. Dove was a Charles H. Revson Fellow at Columbia University in 1993 and received a BA in English from Wesleyan University.