For a little more than half of our 50-year history, Solid Ground was guided by the leadership and wisdom of one woman: Cheryl Cobbs Murphy.

In 1984, Cheryl was hired as the Housing Director of a loosely organized neighborhood organization called the Fremont Public Association (FPA), which ran a handful of anti-poverty programs in North Seattle. By the time she left in 2011, she was Executive Director – and the FPA had transformed into a regional Community Action Agency called Solid Ground with a reputation for innovating programs and driving statewide policy change.  

Under Cheryl’s guidance, we built hundreds of apartments for people moving out of homelessness, developed two urban farms to grow food with and for neighborhoods with little access to fresh produce, and expanded our transportation fleet to help thousands of people with disabilities get where they need to go. 

But if you ask Cheryl which of the many accomplishments from her 27 years at Solid Ground make her proudest, she’ll tell you that her true legacy was embedding anti-racism principles into every aspect of how we work to solve poverty. 

“It’s my life’s work, and so it’s always going to be a part of who I am,” says Cheryl, who continues to work with other nonprofits to prioritize anti-racism. “It’s really important to me – and frankly, I wouldn’t be doing this work if it wasn’t for Solid Ground.” 

“In many ways, it changed my life. It certainly changed how I perceived the world, how I perceived this country, and how I perceived our work at Solid Ground.”

~Cheryl Cobbs Murphy

Today, Solid Ground is built on the understanding that racism and other forms of oppression are fundamental causes of poverty. Many nonprofits now share this belief as well, and others at least espouse the virtues of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). But when Cheryl first took over as FPA Executive Director, few in the mainstream nonprofit sector shared the belief that racism had anything to do with poverty. 

“Frankly, even as a woman of color, I had never really thought about institutional racism,” she says. “Obviously, I thought about racism, and certainly have suffered some of the effects of that in my life, but I’d never thought of it as institutional racism or structural racism.  

“And so in many ways, it changed my life. It certainly changed how I perceived the world, how I perceived this country, and how I perceived our work at Solid Ground.” 

‘All of those things were impacting the people we were serving’ 

Cheryl grew up in Seattle of the 1950s and ‘60s, the daughter of an African American father and white mother who she describes as an “activist.” While her mother held meetings in their house about racism in the Seattle Public Schools, Cheryl experienced it firsthand: She recalls that despite her strong grades, she was excluded from advanced reading classes – they were only for white students at her predominantly Black school.  

Cheryl worked for eight years as Deputy Director of the City of Seattle’s Aging and Disability Services and later as a consultant for nonprofits before taking a job with the FPA as director of its small housing department. The agency was only 10 years old at the time, and FPA staff and leadership were predominantly white, though the communities it served were much more diverse. 

Cheryl had been in the position just nine months when she was asked to serve as Deputy Director for the entire agency, working alongside then Executive Director Frank Chopp, who soon became a Washington State House Representative. Fourteen years later, Cheryl was appointed Executive Director and Frank shifted to Senior Advisor after he was elected Speaker of the House and cut back his time at the FPA to focus more on political work.

“This was not a choice. This was integral to the work that Solid Ground was doing, and nobody was allowed to opt out.”

~Cheryl Cobbs Murphy

She was a few years into her almost 12-year tenure as Executive Director when Cheryl first heard about a training program on “institutional racism,” a term she’d never heard previously. She signed up for the intensive “Undoing Institutional Racism” multi-day training by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond in New Orleans, and immediately saw how the structural forces it described also applied to the people who turned to the FPA for resources and support. 

“We couldn’t serve those folks without knowing how those systems out there impacted them,” she says. “Look at discrimination in housing, look at discrimination in the health care system, look at discrimination in employment, look at the criminal justice system – all of those things were impacting the people we were serving.” 

An organization primed for change 

Cheryl came back from the training inspired by the certainty that the FPA needed to examine every way in which racism creates barriers for people – and that meant looking at how racism showed up within the agency itself. She began sending program managers and directors to the People’s Institute trainings – and then direct service staff as well. 

“At some point I called a meeting, which was not mandatory, for anyone who wanted to talk about the anti-racism work and what we should do as an organization to address institutional racism,” she says. “And like 40-something people showed up for that meeting – which at the time was amazing – to have 40 people show up for a meeting that was not mandatory! So that was actually the beginning of our anti-racism work.” 

There was no guidebook on how to reorient an anti-poverty organization to take on this anti-racism work, so Cheryl and her team began innovating. They convened monthly Anti-Racism Committee staff meetings and organized anti-racism community forums to discuss how racism and racist policies conspire to keep communities of color trapped in poverty. 

Looking both inward and outward  

The FPA examined how it provided services to see if it was creating barriers to people of color’s participation. And they looked within the agency to question why FPA staff didn’t reflect the diversity of the communities it served. 

“When we started doing this work, like 15% of our staff were people of color, and almost half the people that we were serving at that point were people of color. So we figured that we certainly needed to be more representative of the folks we were serving,” she says.  

“We revamped our hiring process. We made sure there was a person of color on every hiring committee. We expanded our recruitment efforts. We were doing things like going to community fairs and talking about job openings – so we were reaching more folks of color. And it resulted in our increasing the percentage of folks of color to about 45% at that point.” 

Today, 61% of Solid Ground employees identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. We also continue to make sure that people of color are represented on our Board of Directors and our Community Accountability Council, a group of people who’ve experienced poverty in their own lives and work to make sure Solid Ground stays true to our mission and values. 

“We worked really hard to make sure we institutionalized the work at Solid Ground –  so that it couldn’t just go away.”

~Cheryl Cobbs Murphy

In its early days, the move to prioritize anti-racism at the FPA drew some pushback within the agency – “but not as much as you might think,” Cheryl says. “One of the things I did was to make it very clear that we were going to do this work. This was not a choice. This was integral to the work that Solid Ground was doing, and nobody was allowed to opt out. And so if you didn’t like it, you should go someplace else.” 

Cheryl’s impact extended beyond the FPA and Solid Ground. As the agency began to get a better grasp of what it meant to embrace anti-racism, other nonprofits started asking Cheryl for guidance. She began meeting regularly with about 20 other nonprofit leaders to talk about anti-racism, and those meetings resulted in the establishment of the Nonprofit Anti-Racism Coalition (NPARC). 

“The whole purpose was to share what we were all learning, share what we were all struggling with, and educate ourselves more about institutional racism and how it affected folks in our community,” she says. 

The legacy of Black leadership 

More than two decades after Cheryl first sowed the seeds of anti-racism at Solid Ground, it continues to be fundamental to how we approach the work of solving poverty. It’s there in our mission, in the way we recruit and train staff and volunteers, and how we go about our work with partners and the community.  

Cheryl, for one, is not surprised to see her work live on. 

“No, because we worked really hard to make sure we institutionalized the work at Solid Ground – so that it couldn’t just go away – it couldn’t just be based on the work of one individual,” she says. 

But there’s something else too. Cheryl may have been Solid Ground’s first Black Executive Director, but she wasn’t its last. She was followed by Gordon McHenry, Jr., now the President and CEO of United Way of King County, and Solid Ground’s current CEO, Shalimar Gonzales.  

Without them, Cheryl says, Solid Ground wouldn’t be the same organization. “Their leadership has made sure that the work continues to be a major focus for Solid Ground. Frankly, there just aren’t a lot of white leaders out there in the nonprofit world who understand the impacts of racism – and to be honest, that would not have been their first priority.” 

Join Cheryl and the rest of the Solid Ground community for our 50th Anniversary Gala on Wednesday, May 8, 5:30pm at SUMMIT – a new and separate venue of the Seattle Convention Center. 

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Image at top: Cheryl poses in 2007 with Ron Chisom, co-founder of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, as she accepts the first-ever Ron Chisom Anti-Racism Award from the Seattle Human Services Coalition.