For over a decade, Living Cities’ impact investing work has helped us advance our programmatic strategies while testing innovative approaches to spark and accelerate social change. Our commitment to using capital to create economic security for people of color in…
CHECKING IN WITH OUR HUMANITY V2
CHECKING IN WITH OUR HUMANITY V2 OVERVIEW Embedding racial equity into an organizational culture requires intentional work everyday. On a personal level, it can require a lifetime of studying, learning, and unlearning. There are many ways to incorporate thoughtful reflection…
Dr. King’s Dream Keepers
History is continuously being made, debated and repeating itself. Thankfully, one thing America does well is creating new leaders of every generation who help us reimagine an equitable society. To honor Dr. King and keep his dream alive on this MLK Day, there are a few people I want to highlight who are following in his legacy as change agents.
Staff Reflections on the Attack on the Capitol
This attack on our democracy was an important historical moment, but it was also a deeply personal one. I am sure that you, like me, have been engrossed in the news about the events of last Wednesday and the tragedy…
Practicing Radical Reimagination
“It is important to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.“ – Angela Davis Practices steeped in hope, dreaming and reimagination have, for generations, continued to and will continue to push the American political landscape until…
How Nonprofits Can Close the Racial Wealth Divide in America
Sevetri Wilson, one of the founders featured as part of the #WealthInColor campaign, provides an overview of the role of nonprofit organizations in addressing racial disparities and shares a reflection on the findings from the Radical Collaboration for Black Wealth…
How Pittsburgh is Mobilizing to Help Businesses Owned by Women and People of Color in a Time of Great Uncertainty
As part of the City Accelerator, the City of Pittsburgh has prioritized equity in their procurement systems, implementing changes to better meet the needs of local businesses owned by women and people of color. On a typical fall afternoon, the…
Centering Equity, Transforming Systems: A Profile on Maia Jachimowicz
As part of our series highlighting alumni of Living Cities’ cohorts, we spoke with Maia Jachimowicz, who currently serves as the VP for Evidence-Based Policy Implementation at Results for America. Maia worked with Living Cities when she was the Policy…
How Cleveland is Assisting Very Small Businesses with Contracting in the City
On May 16, 2019, after Mayor Jackson learned of Cleveland’s grant award from Living Cities and Citi Foundation to participate in City Accelerator’s second Inclusive Procurement cohort, he announced, “There are billions of dollars of development happening in our city….
How to Infuse Learning Throughout Your Organization
In the penultimate post of our Learning, Storytelling and Results series, Senior Associate and Content Strategy Lead Shannon Jordy describes how Living Cities has built and sustained a robust learning and communications practice through our learning liaisons – a unique…
Leveraging Entrepreneurship to Close Racial Wealth Gaps
The latest jobs report shows that our national recovery from the COVID pandemic and its economic impact will be slow and painful for millions of Americans, particularly those who did not have the luxury of wealth before the pandemic. It…
#WealthInColor: Accessing Albuquerque’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
In the latest #WealthInColor infographic, Living Cities and its local partners offer a visual representation of what exists for entrepreneurs in Albuquerque and what doesn’t, so that ecosystem builders can consider the solutions and connections that can be developed or…
Reimagining Our Realities through Storytelling
Racial equity work calls us to imagine new possibilities and different realities from our own because what we need and require does not yet exist – we need to create it, together. It calls us to disrupt mainstream narratives and…
Bringing Heart to Data: How to Measure the Unmeasurable
How can we connect team or project activities to larger organizational goals? And how can we be sure our actions are having a measurable effect on ourselves, our partners and the world? In this blog, we share aspects of our…
A Public Sector Guide to Talking About Race
If the echos and chanting for equity haven’t rang clear in the last seven years since the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2013, we are rest assured that they have now been heard across America. The recent protests emerging…
Building Stronger Relationships Between Governments and Nonprofits
After the tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, protests have swept across the United States. This has led to a wide-ranging discussion about how to reform policing in the country – from a…
Centering Healing and Humanity
Two years ago, we began to prioritize healing justice in our racial equity journey. The desire for this work came from many things. Racism, specifically anti-Black racism, has created real, deep-seated structural harms that are manifested in our institutions, in…
Using Emergent Learning to Meet Challenges and Foster Racial Equity
We have been working to open source social change for about a decade now, and one framework continues to be foundational to how we share our lessons in real time: the Emergent Learning approach. Emergent Learning is a framework for…
Ending White Supremacy Culture: A Resource for Naming What We Mean When We Say Community
Living Cities has learned that to do racial equity work with authenticity, we have to embrace a new way of working. It has to start with us, at the level of individual staff and project teams. As we set about…
Fortis Capital Partners with Living Cities and the City of Minneapolis to Double Down on Bridging Racial Gaps in Access to Capital
A new fund will increase access to affordable debt for small and growing businesses owned by Black and brown people in Minneapolis. Business ownership in Minneapolis is uneven by race. The City of Minneapolis has a total population of 411,500,…