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Mothers and children arriving at a chapter luncheon

Image: Bourgeois Society Studio

Jack and Jill, The Links, and the Architecture of Black Belonging

Jack and Jill of America, The Links Incorporated, how to join — and why the honest answer begins with invitation, sponsorship and a life of service already in progress.

Produced and Edited by the Bourgeois Society Staff

Every family arriving into Black society eventually asks the same question, usually quietly, usually of a trusted friend: Jack and Jill of America, The Links Incorporated — how to join? It is a natural question, and it deserves a respectful, accurate answer.

These are two of the great institutions of Black belonging: one built by mothers around their children, the other built by women around friendship and service. Both are private organisations. Neither posts an application on a website and waits for the world to apply.

What they publish, proudly and publicly, is a model — sponsorship by members, invitation extended by a chapter, and a mission of service that membership is expected to serve.

This is an account of that model, drawn from the organisations' own public pages and the historians who have chronicled them, for families who want to understand the architecture before they ever stand at its door.

A word of care at the outset, because the subject deserves it. Membership mechanics are described here only as far as the public record supports them. Where a chapter's own page states a step, we say so and name the chapter's source.

Where the record is silent — on money, on internal votes beyond what chapters themselves describe, on the private deliberations of private bodies — we leave it silent. Belonging built over generations is not a puzzle to be gamed.

It is a tradition to be understood, and understanding begins with the founding stories, because in both organisations the founding is the membership philosophy, still at work.

Jack and Jill: A Mother's Living Room in Philadelphia

Jack and Jill of America began, as its chapters tell it, in a Philadelphia home, where the late Marion Stubbs Thomas founded the organisation and twenty mothers came together to create social, cultural and educational opportunities for youth between the ages of 2 and 19.

The idea spread city to city — a second group in New York, a third in Washington — until the local clubs restructured themselves into a national organisation, drawing up a constitution and bylaws together. The purpose has never drifted from that living room.

A chapter today describes Jack and Jill in nearly the founding words: a membership organisation of mothers with children ages 2 to 19, dedicated to nurturing future leaders through leadership development, volunteer service, philanthropic giving and civic duty.

That mothers remain the members is the organisation's defining architecture. Fathers are woven through chapter life — assisting, chaperoning, showing up — but the membership itself is a mothers' membership, a design set when mothers were the primary architects of their children's social and cultural world, and kept because it works.

The national president, Kornisha McGill Brown, has described the founding spirit plainly, in words reported by the National Newspaper Publishers Association:

“We started out as a group of friends who wanted to have opportunities for their children to connect. We have grown into more than just a social club.” — Kornisha McGill Brown, National President of Jack and Jill of America, in NNPA

More than a social club, in practice, means programming: leadership training and educational programming for children and teens, cultural events that remain part of chapter life, and attention to the recreational and health needs of Black children and their families. It also means philanthropy with a permanent address.

The Jack and Jill of America Foundation, the organisation's charitable arm, has funded educational and charitable projects for children and families and contributed to Black-focused organisations and causes over generations — the service half of a motto the organisation carries in its very badge and yearbook: Let's Work, Let's Play, Let's Live Together.

How Jack and Jill Membership Actually Works

The public model, as chapters state it themselves, has two doors. The first is legacy. The second is invitation.

A chapter page states it without ornament: membership is obtained via legacy status or via invitation.

Legacy, as the guides explain, belongs to a woman who was herself a child member and left in good standing — or to the wife of a man who was — so that a childhood spent in the organisation can become, in the next generation, a mother's membership in it.

The Phoenix chapter describes the same two routes and puts the legacy definition in terms of a graduating child whose mother's membership remains in good standing.

Invitation, the door most arriving families will meet, runs on sponsorship. Prospective members must be sponsored by a current member of the chapter.

The chapter's own account of the sequence is measured and worth reading closely: prospective mothers are invited to a meeting where qualifications, cost, selection process and other information are discussed; prospective mothers and their families are invited to select chapter open activities, so that everyone can become acquainted; and — the chapter is careful to add — invitation to those activities does not guarantee membership.

Invitation to membership itself is extended after the chapter voting process, and accepted prospective members then meet their financial obligations and attend member orientation before initiation. The Phoenix chapter states the same principle from the sponsor's side: membership is extended through sponsorship by one or more members in good standing of a local chapter.

Women in conversation at an elegant chapter luncheon

Image: Bourgeois Society Studio

Around those two doors stand the eligibility facts the public record does support. A prospective mother must have a child or children between the ages of 2 and 19. Chapters are delineated by geography, so a family shows proof of residency within the chapter's boundaries.

And the expectation placed on a prospective member is stated in terms of commitment rather than résumé: a willingness to commit time to the operation of the chapter, an interest in participating in national and regional events, and the ability to meet the dues and activity costs that membership carries — figures chapters discuss with prospective members directly, in the meetings described above, rather than publish.

Membership is also, by design, limited and selective: reference accounts describe chapters of around forty-five members, with new members admitted as places open. That scarcity is not an affectation. A chapter is a working body that runs a full calendar of programming for children in every age group; its size is set by the work it can do well.

The Links: Friendship, Linked to Service

If Jack and Jill is the architecture of childhood, The Links, Incorporated is the architecture of a woman's civic life.

Its founding, as its chapters recount it, also happened in Philadelphia, where Margaret Rosell Hawkins and Sarah Strickland Scott brought together seven friends to start an organisation answering the cultural, educational and civic needs of African American women, on the tenets of friendship and service.

A Colorado Springs chapter history tells the same founding with its lovely detail: the two founders invited seven friends to join them in organising a new type of inter-city club — friends, in cities along the seaboard, linked to one another. The name was the mission statement.

What grew from that table is described by the organisation's chapters, in consistent language, as one of the nation's oldest and largest volunteer service organisations: more than 17,000 professional women of African descent in 299 chapters across 41 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of the Bahamas and the United Kingdom, committed to enriching, sustaining and ensuring the culture and economic survival of African Americans and other persons of African ancestry.

Its members are described — again in the chapters' own words — as influential decision makers and opinion leaders: business and civic leaders, role models, mentors, activists and volunteers. And the service is counted, not merely claimed: Links members contribute more than 1 million documented hours of community service annually.

The work is organised into five facets, named identically by chapter after chapter: Services to Youth, The Arts, National Trends and Services, International Trends and Services, and Health and Human Services.

Read those five slowly and you have the whole philosophy: children first, culture honoured, the nation's direction watched and answered, the diaspora kept in view, and the health of the community treated as sacred work.

Programmes are carried out through public information and education, economic development and public policy campaigns — which is to say, a Links chapter is not a luncheon club that occasionally volunteers. It is a volunteer service organisation whose members also, deliberately and by founding design, are friends.

The organisation's core values make the order plain: friendship and service lead the list, alongside integrity, commitment, family relationships, legacy, responsibility and accountability.

How Links Membership Actually Works

Here the public record supports a shorter, simpler statement, and we will keep it that way.

Membership in The Links is by invitation, through the sponsorship of a member — a model a chapter president describes in a local profile with disarming directness: new members must be invited to join by a member and are considered by the friends who serve, with chapters looking for the strengths they need and for women who will be a good fit.

There is no public application, no open enrolment, and no published schedule of intakes to plan a life around — chapters consider new members as their work and their fellowship require. What a prospective member can control is the thing sponsors actually watch: a record of service already being done, in the community, for its own sake.

The invitation, when it comes, recognises a pattern. It does not create one.

It is worth pausing on why both organisations guard the door this way, because arriving families sometimes hear invitation-only as exclusion for its own sake. The historians hear it differently.

Lawrence Otis Graham, who spent years interviewing the families of America's Black upper class for Our Kind of People, placed membership in the Links and Jack and Jill at the very centre of that world — alongside debutante cotillions, summers in Martha's Vineyard and Sag Harbor, and an obsession with the right schools, families, churches and social clubs.

His book is described as the first written about the Black elite by a member of that hard-to-penetrate group — and its enduring insight is that these institutions were built, in an era when Black families were shut out of the country's clubs, schools and resorts, to manufacture for their own children and communities what the country withheld: cultural confidence, leadership training, networks of accomplished adults, and rooms where Black excellence was simply the room's assumption.

The guarded door protects the working interior. Inside it, children are known by name across two decades of programming, and women carry service loads measured in documented hours. Small, sponsored and committed is not a pose.

It is the load-bearing structure.

For the Family Arriving: A Respectful Field Guide

So what does a family do, arriving in a new city or a new station of life, hoping one day to be part of this architecture? The public record suggests a posture more than a procedure, and it can be stated plainly.

Serve first, visibly and consistently. Both organisations are service bodies. The woman already tutoring, already chairing the school fundraiser, already running the health fair is the woman sponsors already know.

Be known by members in ordinary life — at church, at school, in professional and civic rooms — because sponsorship is a member staking her own standing on yours, and no one stakes standing on a stranger. Accept invitations to open activities graciously, when they come, exactly as the chapters frame them: an opportunity to become acquainted, carrying no promise.

Ask nothing transactional. The fastest way to misunderstand these institutions is to treat membership as a credential to acquire rather than a workload to join.

And build the belonging that is yours to build in the meantime — the friendships, the service, the cultural life for your children — because that life is, in the end, the very thing the organisations exist to deepen, and families living it fully are the families chapters eventually come looking for.

One more piece of housekeeping for the arriving family, offered in the spirit of this magazine: these institutions sit inside a wider architecture of a life being built deliberately — the estate put in order, the children dressed and taught for the rooms they will enter, the family's name attached to service it can be proud of.

Belonging of this kind is a long project, measured in years of showing up. That is not a discouragement. It is the tradition's whole point, and its dignity.

The Door Is Guarded; the Work Is the Invitation

Jack and Jill began with twenty mothers in a Philadelphia living room who wanted their children to have, in the founding phrase carried in early accounts, all the opportunities possible for a graceful approach to a beautiful adulthood. The Links began with nine friends in the same city who decided that friendship, organised, could move a community.

Neither organisation has ever opened a public door, and neither has ever needed to: the chapters multiply, the service hours accumulate past a million a year, the children graduate and return as mothers, the friends induct their daughters' generation into the work.

For the family arriving, the honest answer to how to join is therefore also the tradition's answer to almost everything: be found doing the work, among the people, over time — and let the architecture recognise one of its own.