Jacquelyn Boggess grew up in Freeport, IL, about 15 miles south of the Wisconsin border. Her grandmother moved from Hickory, MS, to Illinois during the U.S. Great Migration of Black people from the Southern fields to Northern cities seeking jobs and justice.
Jacquie’s father worked his entire life in a tire factory in Freeport, and she still has the clock he was gifted for 25 years of service. Jacquie’s father would send her $25/week while she was away at school, his hard work supporting Jacquie in achieving a Bachelor in Political Science and Women’s Studies and prompting her journey into law.
“I was in an undergrad psychology class, and there was a woman in class who said she wanted to go to law school. I had thought about it, but only one person in my extended family had ever attended college. I had no idea what it really meant to be a lawyer, but I figured if she could do it, I could too.”
After her undergraduate graduation, Jacquie moved to Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin Law School. There, she excelled in the required reading, thinking, and analysis, but after that graduation, she didn’t love being a lawyer. She was interested in the intersection of policy and practice.
“The practice piece is important. How is this policy impacting people in their lives?”
So, it made sense that Jacquie transitioned into policy work in 1995 after practicing law for a decade, eventually leading a policy center focused on the intersection of law, social welfare policy, and social justice. The culmination of these lived and learned experiences allowed Jacquie to recognize the profound impacts of structural inequity in the lives of the families–fathers, mothers, and children. Through this work, she came to understand the deep need for a structural analysis of policy and practice to interrupt the roots of this harmful inequity.
Jacquie found that some policy analysts and many social workers read and responded to status quo policy explanations and analyses with no racial equity lens. With a legal education and an equity lens, Jacquie could read policy and law from the source and analyze for herself. She learned quickly that this colorblind policy analysis approach supported and reinscribed racial inequity.
Her work as a policy analyst focused on Black men in low-income, never-married families. The Clinton administration’s “welfare reform” policy called for charging those men with resources and access that neither they nor the mothers of their children had.
“Status quo policy and practice approached low-income Black fathers as biological parents who were unwilling to support their children. But I believed then and now that we have to recognize how structural racism impacts the lives–from the day they are born–of the infant Black boys who later become men who are fathers. It is the culmination of a lifetime of structural barriers in every aspect of a Black man’s life that have impacted who he wants to be, who he becomes, and what he has to give to his children. We have to look at the society that shapes him. That is the work of policy.”
Jacquie joined the Kids Forward (KF) board for the first time in the late 1990s, drawn by her passion for family policy. Her involvement deepened through a ten-year term and nine more years after returning to the board in 2015. Through both terms, she continued to call on KF to focus on its commitment to addressing race and racism. Jacquie helped champion Kids Forward’s evolution into an antiracist policy center.
Jacquie defines KF’s focus on being an “antiracist policy center” as a commitment to challenging the structural racism that is inherent in our society and is inevitably translated into our social welfare policy.
Jacquie stresses the importance of understanding how structural racism impacts everyone, including people who can identify as white.
“We have to get rid of the false understanding that structural racism is only impacting black and brown people. Understanding how racism is part of a structure that holds our society together must go beyond focusing on people with marginalized racial identities. Built-in inequities also impact people who can identify as white. Access to unearned advantage is certainly an impact. They benefit from structural racism and racial hierarchy–by definition. We must reject colorblindness and discomfort and face racial inequity squarely and unblinkingly.
Also, I don’t believe we can ignore the ravages of race, racism, Jim Crow, and the enslavement and dehumanization of human beings. This is the foundation of structural racism and inequity. We don’t support the status quo because we know how we got here.
An antiracist policy center identifies the seemingly immovable boulder of structural racism that is standing in the path of “justice for all.” Such a policy center describes the boulder of injustice to its constituents. That policy center starts chipping away at the boulder by providing a race analysis of current policy. And, of course, the follow-up, the action step, is that the antiracist policy center recommends policy changes and solutions that will help everyone see the boulder and work together to remove it.”
Jacquie sees KF’s work as crucial in this moment because it directly challenges injustice and advocates for equity. Jacquie urges others to engage thoughtfully—learn, think, and understand the issues at hand—especially as structural racism continues to shape the lives of Wisconsin children and families in profound ways.
“In this moment, Kids Forward has been positioned to have an important impact, to call the question at this moment in our history because there is some evidence (post-2024 elections) that these values are no longer universal. People ‘don’t like politics’; they are ‘burned out’; these issues ‘make them sad.’ In this moment, organizations like Kids Forward and the nINA Collective have to insist that as a society, we come to agreement on the saliency of justice and equity because these values are being rendered meaningless (or, even worse, useless).”
After decades with Kids Forward, Jacquie has stepped down from the board, but not the work. Jacquie continues to teach these values and concepts in her work as a founder/director and consultant with the nINA Collective and as a Senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin School of Social Work.
Learn more and join Jacquie and Kids Forward in reimagining a Wisconsin where EVERY child and family can thrive:
Join Kids Forward’s Partners in Equity
A monthly gift of any amount will include you in Partners in Equity. This special group of Kids Forward supporters is committed to the long-term investments needed to make structural changes to Wisconsin’s systems to support those furthest from opportunity.
Join nINA Collective’s Community of Practice
A space where interested individuals and/or organizations can come together to learn, collaborate, and support each other in their efforts to create a more just and equitable world.
