Patricia Watkins
Target Area Development Corporation
I’m from Chicago and I’ve spent the last 15 years working to improve the lives of Chicago families. I’ve worked for decades basically developing housing, also setting up churches and working to improve public safety and working to improve criminal justice reform…But it wasn’t until 2004 that I began to understand that all the work I was doing was not leading me to the success that I had hoped I would attain. And the reason why was the approach we were using was the wrong approach. We didn’t know about the human rights work. We heard about human rights work, but we thought it was for the lawyers and the people “up there;” it wasn’t for us “down here.” But I’m grateful that in 2004 a light bulb came on for me, and I began to understand that no matter how many laws we pass—we pass one, they’ll pass five, we pass five, they’ll pass ten… No matter how many laws we passed, we were not winning because the opposition and the opposers of justice had more strength and more ammunition than we had. It wasn’t until we came to understand the power of human rights, using the principles of human rights to drive reform, that we began to see a clear light to victory.
