The following principles guide our approach to racial equity:
- Movement Solidarity – We believe racial equity work must be connected and guided by racial justice movements including movements for Black Lives.
- Naming and Confronting Racism: We believe deliberate and focused attention on the various manifestations of racism—interpersonal, cultural, institutional and structural—is required to transform the policies, systems and practices that produce unfair and unjust outcomes by race.
- Systemic Analysis: We believe racial equity change happens by asking and seeking to understand the ways in which history, the distribution of power and resources, and policies, systems and practices work together to create and reinforce racial inequities and injustices. Racial equity work fundamentally seeks to shift power and resources and transform systems and practices to materially change conditions for Black and brown people.
- Shift Power: At its core, the practice of racial equity is a practice of prioritizing leadership of and solutions from people and communities most closely impacted by the issues and injustices we seek to change.
- Intersectionality: We believe analysis and action shaped by the ways that gender, class, sexuality, and other forms of oppression intersect with race contributes to a fuller understanding of racial inequities and better targeted strategies to address them.
- Sustained Commitment: A commitment to long-term, sustained investment in time, money, resources and people is required of governments, institutions and organizations that aspire to make racial equity real at the individual, organizational, community and societal levels.
We view equity as not only a value and desired outcome, but a process of intentional action to:
- Target the distribution of resources and access to opportunity to people and groups that have experienced structural and institutional discrimination and oppression
- Eliminate harmful and unjust policies, practices and systemic barriers that have produced historical and contemporary inequities based on race, gender, class, sexuality, geography and other forms of difference
- Create new systems, policies, and practices that institutionalize equity and support sustainable, transformational change
