In California’s San Joaquin Valley, over 150 community partners and funders are working together to build and advance a racial and health equity agenda based on the priorities of community members.

Read the profile to learn more about the experiences and impacts of this work from the perspectives of the community members, grassroots and community organizations, and funder partners involved.

In Chicago, a network of neighborhood groups is challenging the combined forces of neglect and gentrification pressuring Black and Brown communities to leave valuable neighborhoods near transit hubs.

Read the profile to learn more about the experiences and impacts of this work from the perspectives of the community members, grassroots and community organizations, and funder partners involved.

The Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo is working alongside their grassroots partners to apply a racial equity analysis and support community organizing to elevate the voices and experiences of community residents of color and address lead in housing.

Read the profile to learn more about the experiences and impacts of this work from the perspectives of the community members, grassroots and community organizations, and funder partners involved.

Beyond Recovery presents solutions to keep Santa Fe families housed through the duration of the Covid-19 crisis. It describes 15 actions the city can take to create a more equitable housing system for all residents. It charts the immediate steps necessary to stop current evictions and prevent a flood of evictions as local, state, and federal eviction moratoria lift; codify tenant protections for the long term, and invest in a long-term equitable recovery that addresses the structural roots of our housing crisis.

This report is a collaboration between PolicyLink; Chainbreaker Collective; and Homes For All, a project of Right To The City Alliance. It is the third in a series on evictions in the Covid-19 era; the previous two reports were written as collaborations between Human Impact Partners and Chainbreaker Collective.

Creating healthy and sustainable communities of opportunity requires changing systems and structures to center the priorities and well-being of low-income communities of color. This report chronicles the story of how the Convergence Partnership, after more than 10 years into its tenure, learned to lean into the leadership of local advocates and embrace the power of grassroots organizing. It illustrates how a small and “risky” investment in an early-stage organizing effort supported the priorities and needs of low-income people and communities of color across California. Drawing from a series of interviews with equity advocates and organizers in California, as well as affiliated funders with deep experience in supporting grassroots advocacy, this report includes recommendations for other funders seeking ways to strategically advance health equity through policy and environmental change. Download the report.

Moving from Intention to Impact: Funding Racial Equity to Win, a joint PolicyLink-Bridgespan study analyzes the state of funding for racial equity work. Among a host of important findings, the report offers two key takeaways to funders who want to be generative members of the racial equity ecosystem. First, accountability, a necessity of racial equity work, is impossible without rigorous and transparent reporting. Second, funders must trust and defer to the articulated needs of movement leaders and fund the work that movement leaders say is needed to achieve enduring change. 

Informed by the expertise of movement leaders on the frontlines of this work, this report shares what we’ve learned about funders’ intentions to contribute toward racial equity, and what it will take to move from intention to enduring impact.

Even though lack of reporting makes it relatively impossible to know the true comparison of pledges to deployed capital, our executive summary details three key equity funding concerns that would exist even if all the money pledged were to be deployed:

• The money may not be going to the full range of work that is needed to support transformative change. There needs to be an intentional focus to ensure that funding is directed with the long game in mind, toward initiatives that address the root causes of inequity, not just the immediate problem at hand.

• The money is insufficient to address the historic undercapitalization of organizations doing racial equity work, which are largely led by people of color and focused on systems change.

• The money will disappear. Concerns run high that 2020 was an anomaly, with interest in racial equity energized by a perfect storm generated by the murder of George Floyd and others and a global pandemic — a combination that hopefully will not be replicated.

Strong institutions that have been driving this work, even when funding is scarce, are inviting philanthropy into a conversation about how we aggregate capital, the types of results we want to see, and how to effectively deploy capital to achieve those results. This conversation can foster a relationship between frontline movement leaders and funders that makes it possible to truly win on equity. Funders ready to join in this way can learn how in our action guide.

We Stand for Prevention and Equity is a declaration of the Partnership’s commitment to prevention and equity — just and fair inclusion into a society where all can participate, prosper, and achieve their full potential–to achieve its vision of Healthy People, Healthy Places.  

Our 2021 CEO Blueprint for Racial Equity will guide you beyond diversity and inclusion commitments to the heart of the business opportunity ahead: addressing the intended and unintended impacts of your products, services, operations, policies, and practices on people of color and low-income communities, with key recommendations across the three domains of corporate influence: within the company, within the community, in society.