In 1851, at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, a formerly enslaved woman named Isabella Baumfree who had renamed herself Sojourner Truth rose to speak. Her words cut through a divided hall: “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!” She asked, simply, powerfully: “Ain’t I a Woman?” It was a question that demanded recognition of Black women’s full humanity, their labor, their suffering, their dignity, and their right to be at the center of any liberation movement that claimed to stand for justice.
“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, all alone these women together ought to be able to turn it back and get it right side up again.” Sojourner Truth
More than 170 years later, that question still echoes. Here in Contra Costa County, RCF Connects is answering it this question, not with words alone, but with programs, resources, community investment, and an unshakeable commitment to the health and wholeness of Contra Costs County women and girls.
Sojourner Truth’s activism was intersectional before the word existed. She understood, from lived experience, that you could not fight for women’s rights while ignoring race, or fight for abolition while ignoring gender. Her advocacy was holistic she linked economic independence, bodily autonomy, education, voice, and community as inseparable components of freedom. This is precisely the framework that guides all RCF Connects’ initiatives. For example, women who participate in SparkPoint Contra Costa are building financial muscle and Embodied Leadership develops women from the inside out.
Truth was a deeply relational organizer. She traveled to communities, listened to their pain, and connected people to one another and to resources. She believed that change happened through connection that isolation was a tool of oppression, and that gathering people together in solidarity was an act of resistance. RCF Connects’ mission to “mobilize the power of connection to build healthy, thriving, and equitable communities” is, in many ways, a direct inheritance of that organizing tradition.
Truth also knew that storytelling was transformative. She dictated her memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, in 1850, understanding that bearing witness to her own story on her own terms was itself a revolutionary act. When RCF Connects brings powerful storytellers through the Comment Studios initiative and the Equity for Black Women and Girls fundraiser Angry Black Woman 101 because we know that art has always been a vehicle for social change.
Truth once said she was not going to die, she was going home like a shooting star. Legacy, to her, was not about monuments. It was about the work continuing. The communities lifting themselves. The women and girls who would come after her standing taller because she and so many women after her stood. That is the inspiration behind every program, every fundraiser, and every act of donor generosity that flows throughout RCF Connects.
Since 1851, Sojourner Truth never stopped believing that transformation was possible not because the world was kind, but because she knew that the people in it can thrive. She organized during a time when the law did not recognize her humanity, when the institutions of her day were designed to keep her silent. And still, she built coalitions. She raised funds. She told her story. She connected with people who needed each other, she galvanized and made change.
That is what RCF Connects does every single day and what our donors, partners, and community members make possible when they invest in our initiatives. Every contribution is a vote for the world Sojourner Truth spent her life working toward a world where every woman and girl is seen, supported, and free to soar.