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Mississippi in the Know is a free series of breakfast conversations where members of the community can directly interact with the lawmakers who shape our state’s future and the journalists who provide coverage of it all.

Bring your appetite and questions as you join Mississippi Today in-person at Basil’s Downtown in Jackson or via livestream on Facebook Live for the second event of the Mississippi in the Know series on March 3 at 7:30 a.m., featuring a conversation on critical race theory with Von Gordon, executive director of the Alluvial Collective and moderated by Molly Minta, Mississippi Today’s higher education reporter at 8:00 am.

Mississippi Today Editor-at-Large Marshall Ramsey will also illustrate the event live.

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WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU:

IN CONVERSATION:

Von Gordon, Executive Director of the Alluvial Collective
Molly Minta, Higher Education Reporter

Molly Minta recently published work detailing the views of students in the Law 743 class at the University of Mississippi Law School, the only class teaching critical race theory in the state. The only bill alive in the current legislative session that addresses critical race theory was passed in January by the Senate and is now pending in the House, where Speaker Philip Gunn has virtually complete control of what legislation lives or dies. House leaders, if they want to keep it alive, have until March 1 to pass it out of committee. If they don’t, the bill will die.

Von Gordon, executive director of the Alluvial Collective (formerly the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation), has coordinated or managed the organization’s youth engagement programs and supported its community and capacity building efforts for nearly a decade.

The team at the Alluvial Collective works to end inequity based on difference by cultivating belonging and wholeness through affirming, equitable and healing processes. Gordon believes in building deep relationships with and between those capable of creating transformation and movement towards belonging and justice for communities, organizations, and individuals. 

He serves on the board of directors of Operation Shoestring and Mississippi Statewide Afterschool Network. He is a member of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network. He also serves on the Community Advisory Councils of the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Junior League of Jackson. 

Gordon previously worked in leadership and business development in the food and beverage industries. He attended the University of Mississippi and Jackson State University. 

A native of Moorhead, Miss., Gordon is a passionate husband, father of three, son, brother, and friend. He and his family now reside in Jackson, Miss., stewards of Choctaw land.


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