Our speaker will be Shane Wiegand, teacher and board member of City Roots Community Land Trust.
For the past eight years, Shane has compiling stunning research on the City of Rochester and surrounding towns.
His talk examines how federal policies like redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and urban renewal segregated Rochester, built wealth for its white citizens and disenfranchised people of color. It explores how local civil rights leaders like Howard Coles, Dr. Walter Cooper, Connie Mitchell, Alice Young and many others fought back. Finally, it connects these past policies to the disparity and inequality we see in Rochester today and invites us to learn from and apply the activism of Rochester’s past to its present.
Shane Wiegand is a fourth grade teacher in the Rush-Henrietta School District and the co lead of the PathStone Foundation’s Antiracist Curriculum Project. He has researched, compiled, and taught Rochester’s history of structural racism and resistance in his classroom for the past eight years. Starting with ten fourth grade teachers in his school district, Shane has now trained over three hundred fifty teachers in anti-racist curriculum across multiple districts.
Shane is a board member of Connected Communities, Beechwood Neighborhood Coalition, and City Roots Community Land Trust. He is an adjunct faculty instructor in the URMC Department of Neurology, where he lectures, leads workshops on anti racism and equity. He and his wife live in the Beechwood neighborhood of Rochester.