Holding Up the Mirror: Working Interdependently for Just and Inclusive Communities

About this grant

Increasing racial conflicts in cities like Los Angeles and Cincinnati have fueled the need to bolster race and ethnic relations work. In 2002, 18 organizations gathered along with the Network of Alliances Bridging Race and Ethnicity (NABRE) staff to attend the first phase of a forum to learn about and understand each other’s perspectives and explore ways to build strategic alliances against racism. The resulting publication, "Holding Up the Mirror: Working Interdependently for Just and Inclusive Communities," provided descriptions of nine race relations/social justice approaches.Funding will support the second phase, which will replicate the forum in two communities, to better understand and address local obstacles to building strategic alliances for combating racism. The goals of the forums include building an understanding of the various approaches organizations use in race relations work; creating principles of engagement that can stand the test of different issues and circumstances; developing a process for building strategic alliances; identifying specific ways in which groups can collaborate on community issues; facilitating the development of relationships among the participants at both sites and with NABRE; and sharing the process and lessons learned through the Web.The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, founded in 1970, is a national, nonprofit research and public policy institution. NABRE, a program of the center, works to inform and illuminate U.S. public policy debate through research, analysis and information dissemination.