Dr. Pamela Jolly (’09) Featured by The Kansas Reflector on Economic Parity
Below is an excerpt of the article “This Juneteenth, let’s redefine freedom as parity” by Mark Mccormick. The article was published by The Kansas Reflector on June 19. The full article can be found here.
This Juneteenth, let’s redefine freedom as parity
As we approach our second Juneteenth national holiday, the nation should ponder its definition of freedom. The holiday marks the moment in time when enslaved people in Texas learned they’d been freed from one type of bondage.
But by virtually every social and economic measurement, African Americans have in succession traded one form of bondage for another, from chattel slavery to convict leasing, to sharecropping, to Jim Crow, to today’s mass incarceration.
This Juneteenth, African Americans should consider a new standard for freedom — economic parity. A dear friend, Dr. Pamela Jolly (STH ’09), the CEO of Torch Enterprises, has supported this kind of metric for years. Real parity, she said, begins with understanding our individual and collective contributions to building economic power.
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Jolly, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business and Boston University’s School of Theology, has worked as a credit analyst, a vice president of treasury management, and helped launch financial initiatives designed to educate and inform about the critical role of legacy wealth in the Black community and ways to pursue it. She has hosted legacy wealth cohorts in cities nationwide. She has lectured in Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, Jamaica, China and England.
Her firm’s name, Torch Enterprises, references passing the torch of wealth from one generation to another. Since emancipation, the African American journey toward cross-generational wealth has met with systemic roadblocks. Gaps formed and grew, and not just financial ones.
Read the full article here.