RACE FORWARD

Our Narrative, Arts, and Culture Department works strategically in and through journalism, communications, the arts, popular culture, and cultural organizing to build and secure a culture that centers equity and justice for all. This Department has three major programmatic areas.

• Colorlines. Colorlines advances the stories that are important for all interested in racial and cultural equity and justice. The platform reaches 300,000 people monthly, bringing our readers news, criticism, and analysis to the racial justice movement.

• Strategic Communications. This program area lifts up and advances our research, training, and collective work through transformative messages, stories, and narratives that advance equity and justice in our communities and our world.

• Narrative and Cultural Strategies. This program establishes and advances common language and best practices to advance equity and justice in the arts and cultural sectors, and develops and advances narrative and cultural strategy across sectors and the movement as a whole. Featured efforts narrative change efforts include:

o The Arts Lab, which provides training to improve racial equity in the performing arts;
o The Immigrant Futures Lab, which is working to advance an immigrant and migrant justice narrative system with a robust infrastructure and vibrant ecosystem to challenge the domination of anti-immigrant narratives; and
o The Housing Narrative Change Initiative, which works to center the deep experiences of frontline communities and build power for narratives that lift up the value of safe, affordable, and secure housing.

The Movement and Capacity Building Department builds leadership and capacity within the racial justice movement for grassroots organizations and other institutions to advance racial equity on a national scale. This Department has three major programmatic areas.

• Movement Building and Leadership Development. Race Forward believes that a strong movement for racial justice requires that communities and institutions across multiple sectors of society -- government, philanthropy, and nonprofits -- must operationalize racial equity in their policies, practices, programs, and procedures. We are in the midst of developing a dedicated Leadership Development program that will train a Cohort composed of the leadership of communities of color in a multi-sector movement building space, helping them to collectively develop a comprehensive approach for advancing racial justice in their communities.

• “Race and…” Presentations and Webinars. The “Race And…” presentations and webinars were part of a special series that explores the many ways that race compounds and intersects with all the other issues faced by people of color. These presentations are prepared and released as opportunities present themselves.

• Policy. Policy work, previously housed in their own Department in Race Forward, has been shifted to Movement and Capacity Building in recognition of the importance of our issue-based work in supporting grassroots leadership development movement building. The policy programmatic work has centered on three areas of effort:

○ Energy Democracy, in which we use a racial equity lens and analysis in renewable energy policy and planning. We are the lead national organization coordinating 100% Cities;
○ The Built Environment, in which the structural racism element in the physical structures that surround our lives (e.g., housing, transportation, and education) are addressed in cooperation with community-based cohorts and other regional stakeholders by promoting relationship building, facilitating capacity building, and providing technical assistance to address a range of built environment issue areas; and
○ Food Equity, in which Race Forward provides food security research and materials and supports community organizations dealing with food security issues. We spent the majority of 2019 attending partner convenings, continuing to deepen relationships with existing partners, and connecting allies in the food equity movement to our connections in GARE.

Applied Research provides analysis and materials to help activists, teachers, advocates, and government officials articulate and pursue racial equity standards in their work. It also provides assistance to external partners with which we interact, helping them to assess the effectiveness of their own initiatives and the consistency of their own internal operations. This Department has two major programmatic areas.

• Specific Programmatic Research. The Research Department supports a range of investigations into the specific programmatic objectives of Race Forward and its partners. One current programmatic research effort is the Racial Equity Survey to which over 50,000 government employees working for jurisdictions that are members of GARE are expected to respond. The results of this survey will help Race Forward track and monitor racially equity improvements across time and across jurisdictions for evaluative, descriptive, and potentially predictive purposes.

• Impact Planning and Evaluation. Our research work focuses not only on external projects, but also on assessing and evaluating the impact of Race Forward’s own work. We have redefined the role of one of our team members to increase our capacity for impact planning and evaluation and are developing processes to standardize our evaluation efforts.

Race Forward has three cross-departmental priorities.

• Facing Race Conference. Facing Race is a multi-racial, multi-issue, intergenerational conference that highlights campaigns, projects, research and art that promotes systemic solutions to racial justice challenges. The Conference is held biannually and will next take place in November 2020 in Raleigh, NC.

• Place-Based Strategies. Race Forward’s approach to place-based work takes the components of our Theory of Change and situates them within the unique social and political context of a particular geographic location. This allows the creation of highly effective, highly localized spaces where people come together across issue areas and sectors to develop long-term strategies that shift power and resources to indigenous communities and communities of color.

• Mass Freedom. Criminalization encompasses the institutional attitudes and rules that build the systemic racism that results in people being caged physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, reducing them to criminals without the right to dictate their own lived experiences. Mass Freedom confronts mass incarceration and mass deportation by mobilizing multiracial systemic solutions against the carceral state. It uses a place-based approach to develop region-specific approaches, organizing on a national level and amplified by FRED Talks (educational, inspirational, and motivational presentations by people directly engaged in or affected by the efforts to achieve racial equity). The work is supported by Shattered Families, a field-level research effort into methodologies to increase the humanity and reduce the trauma associated with family separations that can take place during immigration case reviews.