Echo
Quiana Fisher is the oldest of five children, born to an amazing teen mom. Quiana and her siblings were loved and well cared for but the dehumanizing realities of poverty, public assistance and housing instability followed the family throughout Quiana’s formative years. Growing up in Austin, she was surrounded by systematic racism and micro aggressions cloaked in neo-liberalism. During Quiana’s senior year in high school her mother helped her to recognize that “a psychiatrist for poor people” was really called a social worker and that would be how she would change the world.
Attending the outstanding School of Social Work at historic Texas Sothern University, Quiana began to develop a racial equity framework and a commitment to improving systems on behalf of people that looked like her. In 2008 she received her MSW from the University of Houston and now had the credentials to begin her journey to finding her place in the ever-evolving system of helping professionals.
Quiana jumped into the deep waters of macro level work but very quickly recognized that she needed to work directly with the people. She wanted to hear their stories and understand (now as an adult charged with being an “agent of change”) what it looked and felt like to navigate the social service industrial system. She soon realized that although she had gotten older and degreed, receiving services from “well-intended” state-sanctioned systems were just as tone-deaf and traumatizing as she remembered. However, Quiana had found her home in the homeless response system. It was here she learned to build partnership with those she was charged to serve. She learned to listen and allow these resilient, capable (mostly black) people to guide their case management to success. Quiana has worked at every level of the homeless response system and had seen (and felt) how the very white, decision-making rooms consistently minimized the experience of black and brown people. She experienced gaslighting and tokenization all in the name of “opening up the table” but never felt true inclusion, which would have required the sharing and shifting of power.
Quiana’s formal journey into working for racial equity within a homeless response system came in 2019. She was elected to serve as a Co-chair of the Racial Equity Task Group within the Austin/ Travis County Continuum of Care (CoC). Quiana was then ask to participate as a core member of the Racial Equity HUD Demonstration Project for Austin/ Travis County. She led that group in power mapping exercises, knowledge bites, and difficult conversations related to the deconstruction of the white dominate culture that was the homeless response system. Quiana serves as a core member of the Racial Equity Action Team at the Texas Homeless Network. As a member of this team, she facilitated system change through courageous conversations, authentic relationship development and “phase zero” curriculum development for the Texas Balance of State.
She grounds her racial equity framework in the community organizing principles of The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. For Quiana, race equity work is personal. Ending the injustice of homelessness is urgent. The faces of so many people experiencing homelessness throughout the country look like her cousins, high school classmates, aunts, and her two young sons. Community organizing was the work of generations of her ancestors and its that wisdom added to the earnestness of disproportionality, ineffective social service policies, and a fully developed understanding that those most effected by any problem are also closest to the solution. Quiana has learned (and continue to learn) in racial equity community organizing, what she learned as a Housing Stability Case Manager. People experiencing homelessness (disproportionally black) are resilient and capable of leading our homeless response systems to success.
