We believe the diversity of our community is one of Alexandria’s greatest assets. ACT for Alexandria is embarking on a journey with our colleagues across the City to achieve a future when race no longer predicts one’s outcomes in life; when everyone has what they need to thrive, no matter what neighborhood they live in, the color of their skin, their gender, or where they were born.
As Alexandria’s community foundation, this vision of a vibrant community is core to our work. In order to move this vision forward, we asked 250 nonprofit, civic and business leaders at the recent IMPACT 2019: Racial Equity Forum what they need. Here’s what they said:
- Training for board and staff members
- Resources to learn more about racial equity
- Convening people in a safe space to have conversations to learn with and from one another
- Developing leaders and creating a pipeline of people to serve on boards and commissions
- Funding for organizations to get started or continue this work
To address these needs, we are kicking off a Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative. It includes:
- Workshops that address what it means to be an ally for racial equity and build bridges to ensure equity, opportunity and inclusion for everyone. These one-day workshops will be open to everyone in the community. Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and The Bruhn-Morris Family Foundation.
- A Design Lab with participants from the workshops to capture feedback about their desired continued learnings around racial equity with the goal of creating a peer cohort group, which began in October 2019.
- A six-month Learning Lab to equip leaders in effective racial equity implementation in their organizations.
- Community conversations that bring people together for dialogue to build deeper understanding and surface new ideas and solutions.
- Capacity-building grants that help nonprofits build know-how and knowledge about racial equity with their staff, board and constituents.
Participate in Our Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative Events:
Allyship workshops: What does it mean to be effective allies to people of color in our work for racial equity? ACT has hosted 7 sold-out workshops in 2019. The original Allyship workshop is a day-long session, but the next workshops will be divided into two virtual sessions on Zoom. Please only sign up if you are able to attend both dates (June 18 and 19 or July 13 and 14) and you are able to use the Zoom platform. Whitney Parnell, executive director and co-founder of Service Never Sleeps (SNS), will lead an intensive, fast-paced webinar series designed to explore how to use individual and collective areas of privilege to advance racial justice. Using SNS’ CLAIM framework (Care, Learn, Act, Influence, Maintain), this workshop will explore what it means to adopt an Allyship lifestyle. These two-day virtual workshops are open to individuals living in or serving the Alexandria community.
If you seek to promote racial equity within your organization, this workshop will equip you with tools to be an active ally for racial justice through methods of naming white privilege, centering people of color, navigating intersectionality across identities, influencing others, and continuing your own self-work journey. You’ll leave this workshop committed to the Allyship lifestyle, and prepared to facilitate change in your own workspace.
Register for June 18 and 19
If you have any questions or need scholarship assistance, please contact Brandi Yee at
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Racial Equity Capacity Building Initiative is sponsored by:
Resources
- To Our White Friends, Empathy is Not Enough, Whitney Parnell
- Opening to the Question of Belonging , john a. powell
- The Roots of Implicit Bias, Daniel Yudkin and Jay Van Bavel
- Yes You Have Implicit Biases Too, David Gooblar
- The Groundwater Approach; Building a Practical Understanding of Structural Racism
- Putting Racism on the Table: Robin DiAngelo on White Privilege
- Shifting Philanthropy from Charity to Justice , Dorian Burton and Brian Barnes
- What Does it Look Like for a Community to Own its Future , Meghan Hafner and Elizabeth Ramaccia
- We are also exploring Alexandria's own history. Check out this video about our community's schools - The Secret Seven: Integrating Alexandria's Schools.