The mission of Pan-African Cultural Exchange (PACE) is to unify artists and educators of the African Diaspora through art, travel, and cultural exchange.

Through the launch of Zora’s Legacy, we hope to foster a deeper understanding and sense of unity between Afro-descendant American and Afro-Puertorrican teaching artists (TAs). These individuals currently represent some of the most commonly marginalized groups in the Western Hemisphere. And we know that this type of unification can ultimately combat feelings of isolation, empower individuals, and put entire communities on a path towards social inclusion and economic growth. 

What’s more, we know that across the United States, Black-identifying TAs have been called upon to serve as the social, emotional, and cultural responders for Black-identifying children who attend U.S. public schools—schools that have been experiencing a steady decline in childhood arts education programs since the early 1980s and have been implementing Eurocentric curriculums and colonized ideologies of success since their inceptions. 

Yet there remains a tremendous lack of demographic data on Black-identifying TAs. To date, we have not been able to identify any large-scale ethnographic study on this population. 

There is an immediate need for us to better understand our Black-identifying TAs, so that we can better support them in teaching our Black-identifying youth. With the launch of Zora’s Legacy, we are hoping to better understand our Black-identifying TAs. And in the process, we would like to evaluate the effectiveness of the Afrocentric Social-Emotional Learning framework in meeting their needs.