Projects & Partnerships

Communities Creating Racial Equity Initiative

In 2007, Everyday Democracy launched a two-year initiative called “Communities Creating Racial Equity” (CCRE). The focus of the initiative was twofold: to help communities develop their own ability to create sustained civic engagement and change on issues related to racial equity; and to learn along with them about what it takes to address racial equity. Through CCRE, we’ve deepened our organizational learning on racial equity, and developed a more explicit commitment to racial equity as key to our mission and goals.

Eight communities across the country joined the CCRE initiative: Hopkinsville, Ky.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Lynchburg, Va.; Montgomery County, Md.; New Haven, Conn.; South Sacramento, Calif.; Stratford, Conn.; and Syracuse, N.Y. Over the two-year initiative, the communities engaged more than 3,000 people in more than 177 dialogues. During this time, we provided coaching, how-to materials, and two national learning meetings. In addition, during the past year, the communities applied for small grants of $10,000 from Everyday Democracy to help support the implementation of actions that emerged from their dialogue processes.

Communities Creating Racial Equity came at a critical time in the life of our country. There has been more discussion of race and racism within civic circles, partly because of the “post-racial America” analysis embraced by some after the 2008 presidential election. Though we believe this analysis to be misguided, we do find that the national discourse on race is shifting in important ways, and CCRE has enabled us to learn from the shift and help to shape it. Also with the severe economic recession that is now in its second year, communities across the U.S. are facing difficult challenges, with growing racial disparities as a glaring part of the picture. We are committed to continuing the learning begun in this initiative, and to sharing our lessons (see Lessons tab) with communities and with multiple disciplines within the civic field.

The Communities

This page will soon feature profiles of all eight communities that took part in the Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative.

Hopkinsville, Kentucky

The primary goal of the program is to build off of the momentum from the initial round of study circles by bringing people from diverse backgrounds to the table to discuss racial and ethnic inequities and how racism is affecting the city of Hopkinsville.

Hopkinsville, Ky., residents participate in evaluation trainings (2008).

Because nearly half of the prison inmates in the region are people of color, community leaders realized they needed to look for solutions.

More than 100 Hopkinsville residents took part in the dialogues. Among other things, they took a hard look at the root causes of racial inequities in the criminal justice system.

With support from the Human Relations Commission, Hoptown-Our Town has paved the way for change. At an October 2009 action forum, dialogue participants came up with a number of plans. By February 2010, the following steps had been taken:

• The chief of police and sheriff signed a joint proclamation supporting the recommendations from the dialogue participants.
• The Hopkinsville Police Department scheduled its first diversity training for March 2010.
• Seven small grants were awarded to local organizations, with the aim of improving community-police relations.
• Hopkinsville’s leaders, including the police chief, sheriff, and county attorney, agreed to support recommendations for building better relations between residents and public safety officials.

Looking ahead, Hoptown-Our Town has plans to broaden participation in the dialogues, conduct community surveys to find out how people feel about the criminal justice system, and develop recommendations that might help local agencies reduce the number of people of color in the penal system.

Jacksonville, Florida

The Jacksonville Human Rights Commission (JHRC) works to ensure that all Jacksonville residents enjoy a community free of discriminatory practices.

Residents from Jacksonville, Fla., participate in an action forum (2008).

For more than 10 years, Project Dialogue to Action has worked to increase public awareness of racial inequities in Jacksonville. The project has focused on a variety of issues, including economic development, housing, and the criminal justice system.

A study conducted in 2008 revealed that a large number of Jacksonville’s minority residents live in a part of the city where they are exposed to greater health risks and crime-related problems. According to the study, many of these residents lack the resources to seek quality health care; and many are not treated fairly by health care providers.

To find ways to address health care inequities for people of color and low-income families, the Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, together with the county health department and other community agencies, launched “Place Matters.”

This program gave residents an opportunity to talk and work together to identify needs and find ways to improve access to quality health care in low-income areas of the city.

In June 2009, program organizers increased the scope of the project. Plans included building relationships with community partners who share an interest in health care issues; developing a marketing campaign to promote the dialogue; and evaluating the effectiveness of the program. To encourage more people to take part in the community dialogue, they brought in facilitators who know a lot about race-based inequities in health care.

At an action forum in December 2009, participants formed teams to raise awareness of health care inequities and to tackle economic, environmental, nutrition, and safety issues related to health. The work of the action teams and Place Matters continues in 2010.

Lynchburg, Virginia

Mission: To create a racially equitable community where race and/or ethnicity are not predictors of success in any aspect of life and where public policies, institutional practices and social structures no longer favor one group over another.

Participants gathered to hear the action ideas that were generated by all the study circles.

Working with the Neighborhood Executive Advisory Council, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Lynchburg Community Council, and interested citizens, city leaders formed an advisory board to lead the effort.  Many community organizations backed the initiative, reaching into all sectors of the community to encourage people to join this community-wide effort. The city supports the initiative by employing an Assistant to the City Manager who acts as community liaison to the project. 

The formal dialogue program began in January 2008 with 600 participants and 100 facilitators. That spring, the general public was invited to a three-day action forum where they could view lists of ideas for action, talk with people who had taken part in the dialogue, “vote” for their favorite action ideas, and sign up to help out. At a final action event, priorities for action were announced. 

MVOC is ongoing. By 2010, more than 1,300 people had participated! The advisory board has applied for 501(c) 3 status and action teams meet on a routine basis to make plans and implement ideas that emerge from the dialogue groups. Plans are in place to expand the program in the faith community, schools, local businesses, and in the greater community. 

• A partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau and members of the advisory board and the Communications and Media Action Group to educate the public about the census and encourage people to be counted
• Improved diversity training within the Lynchburg Police Department and at the Criminal Justice Academy
• Better relationships between police officers and students who get together over breakfast or lunch
• Efforts to bring more diversity to the workforce at the police department, and in local businesses and on boards and commissions in the city
• Study circles in Lynchburg’s middle schools

Syracuse, New York

Goal: Race will no longer be a key factor in determining academic achievement and high school graduation rates for the Syracuse City School District.

A community choir sings the gospel classic “When All God’s Children Get Together” and “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent at CWD’s 10th anniversary celebration.

Community Wide Dialogue to End Racism (CWD) has been ongoing in Syracuse since 1997. More than 6,000 people of all ages have taken part in one of the nation’s longest running efforts to address racism and racial inequities. Outcomes include:

• Implementing fair-lending practices at a local bank
• Increasing numbers of people of color on local boards
• Pairing city and suburban schools for a high school exchange program for students (In 2008-09, 186 students participated in dialogues to build understanding about the effects of white privilege and structural racism.)
• Launching dialogues between the refugee community and American-born residents (Following the dialogues, over 500 people took part in a peace march, and a police-community forum was held to address racial tensions between refugees and the police.)

At present, CWD has decided to concentrate its efforts on the gap in student achievement in the Syracuse City School District. At the request of a high school principal, CWD launched a pilot program designed to help staff cope with rising racial tensions at the school and to look at the root causes of the gap in student achievement between Whites and students of color. Results include:

• Expanding reading lists to include authors of color
• Reworking the American and World History curriculum to more accurately reflect contributions of people of color
• Decorating a classroom to reflect images and cultures of people of color

Building on the success of that pilot, CWD expanded the program, working with three more city high schools, one middle school, and one grammar school. The goal for the first year was to reach an additional 150 staff in the district.

Elements of the project include:

• Professional staff development for the Syracuse City School District, including dialogue to address the gap in academic achievement, and leadership development to train dialogue leaders to expand the reach of the program
• Continuation of the city/suburban school exchanges aiming to reach at least 450 students, 40 staff, and 40 volunteers (Eight high schools, two middle schools, and two grammar schools were expected to participate in semester-long dialogues.)
• Parent/staff dialogues focusing on academic achievement and school completion goals
• Implementation of action plans through school systems and structures

New Haven, Connecticut

Mission: To work toward a thriving New Haven that includes all voices and engages and values each member of its community .... [and to] encourage increased racial equity and specific inclusion of marginalized groups and youth.

Members of the New Haven organizing committee take part in an evaluation training.

Community Mediation, Inc., took the lead on a city-wide effort aimed to create a “culture of dialogue,” neighborhood by neighborhood. They hoped to generate a sense of shared ownership and accountability among New Haven residents.

Guided by a diverse group of community leaders, New Haven 2020: It Starts Now brought neighbors together to address issues affecting the well-being of youth. Close to 120 people took part in neighborhood-based dialogues.

In 2009, action teams formed in four neighborhoods. A committee was established to oversee the work of the action teams, and provide support, as needed, including evaluating the action projects.

 
The action teams focused on:

• Building better relations between teens and police.  In one neighborhood, teens and police took part in a series of dialogues which led to improved relationships.
• Improving literacy, in both English and Spanish. Immigrant Parents/ESL Action Team (JUNTA) hoped to increase student participation in ESL classes by conducting dialogue in conjunction with the ESL program at Hillhouse High School. And school administrators approved a program to give high school seniors community service credits for participating in after-school ESL classes.  
• Involving more children in a neighborhood reading program. This same neighborhood hosted a series of dialogues with teens to hear their concerns and act on their suggestions for improving the neighborhood. 
• Creating a community garden to connect youth with mentors. LEAP—a mentoring project focusing on improving academic achievement—used the garden as a way to help young people of color from one neighborhood get to know mentors.

Almost all of the action teams recognized the need to build youth leadership and to involve youth in the action projects. In 2010, several groups planned to put a lot of energy into engaging more young people—encouraging them to be trained as facilitators and to support an action effort.

Working with nonprofit groups, the police department, city officials, and concerned citizens, New Haven 2020 hopes to expand, over time.

Lessons

We hope that communities around the country addressing issues of racial equity and racism can take some of the lessons we've learned from the Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative and apply it to their work.

Three years ago, Everyday Democracy (then Study Circles Resource Center) launched the Communities Creating Racial Equity (CCRE) initiative to better understand the intersection of civic engagement and racial equity. We had questions such as...

• Is it possible to address structural racism directly through inclusive dialogue, action and problem-solving?
• Is it possible to begin a racial equity change process aimed at measurable structural change with a public dialogue process?

While we still have much to learn, the lessons from Communities Creating Racial Equity have strengthened our tools and advice on linking dialogue to measurable change, and our ability to integrate three critical kinds of advice – in racial equity, strategic communication, and evaluation – into all our assistance. A summary of our lessons are described below, but the learning does not stop here. We realize that organizing civic engagement and linking it to measurable change on racial equity is a work in progress.

Since Everyday Democracy and many of the communities are committed to continuing their work on racial equity beyond this initiative, the following findings are a snapshot in time of what happened. We will continue to expand on these findings as we and communities broaden our work on racial equity.

Key lessons:

• Communities can connect dialogue to action on issues of racial equity. Dedicating program staffing to supporting action and change seems to play a key role.
• There is value in understanding what the underlying assumptions about how a project will lead to social change.
• Tools to address closing racial disparities cannot be used in isolation, without the training to help people understand the ideas and concepts embodied in them.
• It takes time to grasp the deeper meaning of working on racial equity. (See our glossary of terms in the Tools tab) This was true for Everyday Democracy, and true for the eight communities. Many community people (of all backgrounds) who want to “work on race” need to spend time learning what  racial equity means, how patterns of disparity and poor outcomes are tied to policies and structures which may be hidden or misunderstood.  
  
  In a number of the communities, a diverse cross-section of community leadership has gained a much deeper understanding of what racial equity means, and have begun to work in multi-racial teams to achieve specific racial equity outcomes. While establishing this baseline of understanding took longer than we had imagined, we can see it taking hold in several communities, and we believe that it will continue to drive their dialogue and change efforts.
• There were important racial equity outcomes in many of the communities. Within this project, these outcomes include concrete changes in policing; changes in municipal hiring practices; changes in school district practices; and more. (See the Communities tab.) 
• As an organization, we have greatly advanced our internal understanding and practice around racial equity. We understood in some way that this internal work would be key to our work with communities, but we hadn’t fully appreciated the depth of the work that this initiative would cause us to carry out. This has affected the ways in which we work with others in the democracy field, with communities outside this project, and our communications. It has affected our internal policies and our ongoing commitment to organizational learning on structural racism.
• By continuing to name the importance of explicitly addressing racial equity, we and our community partners had to keep pushing ourselves to explore its deeper meanings for organizational and community change. Of course, none of this is easy, but given what our country needs to work on in terms of race, we think it is critical to be explicit about this and keep at it.
  
  In addition to the power of continued naming, for this initiative, we found that there were a number of ways to encourage community coalitions to deepen their knowledge and commitment: through communication assistance; through providing evaluation assistance with a racial equity lens (helping them identify specific racial equity goals); through trainings in structural racism and how to address it; and through learning meetings. 
• We are learning more about how to provide the tools that can help communities move from dialogue to action, and where to focus our learning. In particular, it is useful to help communities figure out how to select action steps, how to support the movement to action and change, and to figure out what contribution their efforts can make to reducing racial disparities. It is important to find ways to help them target their actions and understand what their “theory of change” is, without becoming overwhelmed with some of the more technical aspects of evaluation. 

Feedback from the communities on the structure of the initiative:

What worked:

• 

  Leslie King from Lynchburg, Va., and Molly Barrett, Program Liaison & Editor for Everyday Democracy, share ideas at the Learning Exchange in April 2009.

  The learning exchanges helped connect and support the communities. All eight communities described the two learning exchanges that brought them together from across the country as supportive, helpful and uplifting. Communities recognize that working on structural racism/racial equity is challenging and knowing that there are others you can call upon for support is essential.
• The trainings were inspiring and challenging. The communities valued our trainings on organizing, facilitation, evaluation and structural racism. Some communities even took part in additional trainings to strengthen their content knowledge of structural racism and evaluation. Learning how to use evaluation tools was a challenge for some communities. Introducing the evaluation training early in the initiative, however, helped prepare the communities to explore the best racial equity outcomes and action ideas.
• Communities used the grants to jumpstart some of the action ideas. The $10,000 grants served as a springboard for helping the communities implement some of their action ideas. As a funding prerequisite, the communities developed logic models to help them prioritize and focus on the ideas most important to forwarding their work. Completing a logic model also helped the communities realize that they did not have to implement or track every action idea, just those that mattered the most to them. Understanding this frame helped the communities appreciate the usefulness of evaluation.
• Everyday Democracy modeled working in bi-racial teams with communities: The communities appreciated  Everyday Democracy's openness and transparency on our own internal racial equity work. We sought to model the kind of multi-racial interactions within the organization that we encourage our communities to do.

Where we can improve:

• We need to give communities a longer lead time in understanding and coming to terms with the meaning of racial equity. Providing the communities with more in-depth trainings on structural racism earlier in the initiative could have made a real difference. At the time, we as an organization were developing our own knowledge of racial equity, so we did not yet have a shared way of talking about the issue. With the help of our outside evaluator, we began to increase our capacity to deliver the support communities needed to make progress on racial equity.
• There are limits to what we can learn about successful action implementation in various issue areas. While we have learned several possible pathways to action, we realize that we as an organization are limited in our knowledge. We are currently deepening our learning on what it takes to make action happen while also trying to figure out the boundaries of our work. We are exploring the idea of connecting with issue-specific organizations that are better positioned to work with communities on the action phase of their work.
• Making additional funding available to the communities could go a long way. Many of the communities have established logic models, have a deeper understanding of racial equity, and are moving ahead on their action ideas. We will continue to advise the communities, but we realize that any amount of funding could help them go further.

Podcasts

News Articles

All news articles...

Tools

• Glossary of Racial Equity
  
• Racial Equity Tools web site is designed to support people and groups who are working for inclusion, racial equity and social justice. The site includes ideas, strategies and tips, as well as a clearinghouse of resources and links from many sources.
  
  Racial Equity Tools web site is a companion site to Evaluation Tools for Racial Equity which helps people track progress and document results of similar work, in racially explicit and competent ways.
  

• Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building (PDF) (Maggie Potapchuk, Sally Leiderman, Donna Bivens and Barbara Major) A monograph that analyzes community building through the lens of white privilege and racism and suggests many places where we might do our work differently, with different assumptions, behaviors, understandings, actions, roles and relationships.
  

• Structural Racism and Community Building (PDF) (The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change) This publication describes the problem of structural racism in the United States and highlights its implications for community building.

Comprehensive Discussion Guides

Dialogue for Affinity Groups (2008)

Download

Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation (2008)

Add to cart Download

Show less...

Foreign Language Discussion Guides

Cómo enfrentar el racismo en una nación diversa (2006)

Add to cart Download

Diálogo para grupos homogéneos (2006)

Download

Show less...

Videos

Addressing the student achievement gap through dialogue and action (2010)

Hopkinsville, Ky., residents make strides in improving police-community relations (2010)

Many Voices, One Community program addresses structural racism (2010)

South Sacramento Media Action Forum (2010)

Stratford, Conn., residents address racial equity issues in policing, education, and town leadership (2010)

Communities Creating Racial Equity: Learning Exchange 2009 (2009)

Greensboro: Closer to the Truth movie trailer (2009)

Lynchburg, VA: Many Voices, One Community action forum (2008)

Lyunchburg, VA: Many Voices, One Community video (2008)

Montgomery County Public School students sharing their dialogue-to-change experiences (2008)

Montgomery County Public School Study Circles (2006)

Add to cart

Syracuse Study Circles: Community-Wide Dialogue (1999)

Add to cart

Show less...

Story Booklets

Springfield, Illinois: Where conversations about race create ripples of community (2005)

Add to cart Download

Vermont: Where deep-rooted democratic traditions open the way for study circles (2005)

Add to cart Download

Where a diverse community comes together to make schools better for all (2006)

Download

Show less...

Newsletters

Focus on Everyday Democracy (Spring 2010) Volume 21, Issue 1 (2010)

Download

Focus on Everyday Democracy (Fall 2009) Volume 20, Issue 2 (2009)

Download

Focus on Everyday Democracy (Spring 2009) Volume 20, Issue 1 (2009)

Download

Focus on Everyday Democracy (Fall 2008) Volume 19, Issue 2 (2008)

Download

Focus on Everyday Democracy (Spring 2008) Volume 19, Issue 1 (2008)

Download

Focus on Study Circles (Spring 2007) Volume 18, Number 1 (2007) (2007)

Download

Focus on Study Circles (Fall 2006) Volume 17, Number 2 (2006)

Download

Show less...