As the Director of The Boston Foundation, Lee Pelton is leading the charge to solve the city’s long standing wealth gap problem.
As the director of The Boston Foundation, Lee Pelton is leading the charge to solve the city’s long standing wealth gap problem. In 2022, the foundation created the Greater Boston Partnership to Close the Racial Wealth Gap, as Boston Magazine reported. The efforts are not new, but the scale is.
Symone Crawford, the executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance and a member of the partnership, described it to the magazine, saying, “It’s new in the sense that we have more people at the table and more decision makers who can, I would hope, make change.” Pelton, whose 2020 reflection on the murder of George Floyd went viral, channels James Baldwin when asked what his motivation is for attempting to tackle the racial wealth gap in Boston, saying, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
The partnership’s website also reflects this belief, as it gives a brief overview of the sense of the scale of the initiative, “With a data-informed and mission-driven approach to advance racial and economic equity, the Wealth Gap Partnership brings together housing, financial, nonprofit, philanthropic and civic leaders to develop approaches to support, strengthen, and expand the current landscape of affordable homeownership, and through it, build intergenerational wealth for communities of color.”