| Corey B. Best is a Black father, community organizer, activist, and leader. Originally from Washington, DC, Corey now resides in Florida. Corey has attached himself to “justice doing” — a movement and never-ending journey of being guided by the principled struggle to advance racial justice within this nation’s child welfare and human service delivery systems. This work puts Corey in front of more than 10,000 professionals annually, and has afforded him with the fundamental knowledge about the importance of connecting to something bigger than himself–allowing perspective, pain, truth, joy, and vulnerability to surface in search of meaningful, collective impact. In all his endeavors, Corey brings a deepened historical and contemporary analysis of the invention of race, racism, systems of oppression and how those systems interconnect to produce white advantage gaps. Corey founded Mining For Gold in 2020. Mining For Gold is part of the larger movement that is in the active pursuit of racial justice, liberation, and freedom. The idea for Mining For Gold is directly influenced by the 405 years of racialized arrangement in our communities, and that we all have pieces of metaphorical gold flowing within us. The mantra is, sometimes we must sift through pounds of dirt to find an ounce of gold. As a practice and a discipline, Mining For Gold is held accountable to holding gathering spaces with communities and institutions, and is rooted in justice-centered culture building as the most effective strategy to achieve relational and communal health. Mining For Gold embraces the universal application of co-design and community organizing to guide child and family serving systems toward a more robust, ideal, and healing way of thinking and practicing. This approach centers the knowledge, proximity, and experiences of those who are most impacted. Corey was awarded the 2021 Champion for Children’s Award in Advancing Equity, the 2022 Outstanding Service in the Advancement of Cultural Competency in Child Maltreatment Prevention and Intervention Award and was recognized as a 2022 Breakout Star by Evolve Strategy Group. In partnership with child welfare leaders, communities and parents, Corey has curated the racially just and equitable Authentic Family Engagement and Strengthening Approach (AFES). Since 2020, Mining For Gold has held a brave container to explore the impact of racialized America with over 3,000 child and family serving leaders and staff. Mining For Gold launched the Liberated Voice Exchange (LVE) in 2022. LVE is the home to Audio Nuggets podcast, the Mining For Gold cypher. In this all-Black container, we witness and experience how traveling the stony road toward freedom is a journey trekked with love, resistant abolitionism, dignity, and revolutionary muse makers. When one has eavesdropped on the political analysis, they’ve come to know that on Audio Nuggets we strive to bend the arc on non-linear modes through conversations that tug and pull from the best of who we are. We give ourselves rooted permission to tell a collective story of the principled struggle for liberation. |
“We did not come here to fear the future. We came here to shape it.” -Barack Obama
