Last year our School of Social Work class, a service learning course with the Community Empowerment Fund, learned how to use a racial equity toolkit to assess 5 local community policies or programs and hopefully produce an analysis that was informative and useful to our elected officials. The topics were presented by the 4 local elected officials who were serving on the Leadership Team for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness: Kathleen Ferguson from the Hillsborough Board of Commissioners, Sally Greene from the Chapel Hill Town Council, Mark Marcoplos from the Board of County Commissioners, and Damon Seils from the Carrboro Board of Aldermen. They each suggested a policy or program in their jurisdictions that they felt could use analysis with a racial equity lens. Topics included Hillsborough’s clean energy resolution, Chapel Hill’s purchase of the American Legion property, redevelopment of the former Chapel Hill Town Hall, short range transit planning, and programming for Department of Social Services clients. We used a toolkit developed by the Seattle Office of Civil Rights and the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE). The folks with GARE wanted to share our experience on their Race to Democracy website, “an open source campaign to build a more inclusive democracy that advances racial equity.” We worked with them to create a blog post on the analysis of the American Legion property.
You can read the post here.
The full report is available here.
And stay tuned, we’ll be doing another set of racial equity analyses for our community in our course this fall!
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