The census holds power to bring visibility, resources and political agency to our communities. It’s up to us to share the facts and mobilize each other around the upcoming census, so that our communities receive equitable resources and representation in…
Reimagining Black Wealth: Asking 400 Year Old Questions
As researchers and conveners, we know that addressing the root causes for our country’s racial disparities requires expertise and radical collaboration. On our quest to understand what it takes to achieve more equitable outcomes for all people in a country…
#WealthInColor: Michael Meredith of VPG Enterprises
As part of our #WealthInColor video series, we’re proud to be able to highlight the first of our New Orleans entrepreneurs. Michael Meredith of VPG Enterprises is an engineer, former baseball player, previous employee of a Fortune 5 oil company,…
Living Our Values as a 21st Century Learning Organization: Lessons from Digital Community Engagement
We spent two years building a digital community engagement tool to help practitioners close racial gaps. We share our lessons learned in a new report. Living Cities has been exploring and defining what it means to be a 21st century…
3 Cities Using Capital to Build More Inclusive Ecosystems
Eighteen months ago, in collaboration with Living Cities, Rockefeller and Surdna Foundations, we launched Start Up, Stay Up, Scale Up (SU)3 — an initiative designed to address the challenges in access to capital, social networks, and expertise that entrepreneurs of…
Personal Reparations
When reparations discussions began to make big news, I didn’t need to understand what, exactly, was being proposed in order to know in my bones that they were due. The ways in which wealth was built on the backs of…
Dominican / American
This blog is part of our series highlighting Latinx staff members in honor of Latinx Heritage Month. This Latinx Heritage month, I’d like to share a little bit about my parents’ country of origin-the Dominican Republic (aka DR, not to…
#WealthInColor: Red Planet Books and Comics [VIDEO]
Red Planet Books and Comics owner Lee Francis tackles the perceptions of and narratives about Native Americans and their communities, and has important lessons for investors in New Mexico and beyond. In the second video in Living Cities’ #WealthInColor series,…
Building Inclusive Ecosystems: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]
How can we build ecosystems that put entrepreneurs of color at the center? At HBCU@SXSW we had a conversation about how inclusive ecosystem building can address the country’s legacy of racial disparities by engaging, investing in, and supporting founders of…
Healing-Informed Collective Impact: The Reflection and Practice
Read the first blog in this series, Healing-Informed Collective Impact Applying the TIS philosophy to a traditional collective impact model required us to unravel how our processes as backbone organizations and facilitators can create respectful, healing-informed partnerships, central to the development…
Afro-Latinidad
I have never had the privilege of not being aware of myself and my external appearance. Looks have always mattered for me and here’s an example of why: When I was around thirteen years old, I spent a summer in…
Healing-Informed Collective Impact
Whether it be equitable housing in San Francisco, workforce development in New Orleans, or inclusive innovation in Albuquerque, cities engaged with The Integration Initiative (TII) are working collectively within and across their regions to solve some of our country’s most wicked problems….
Power of Collective Action
At Living Cities, we believe collective action is the framework through which we can achieve change at a systems level. Most recently, we decided to approach narrative change through a collective action framework with the belief that it will help us shift…
An Exciting Update from Living Cities: JaNay’s New Role as Chief Strategy Officer
Living Cities’ strategy has evolved radically since the early 1990s. Following a pivot away from community development, today, it’s putting racial equity front and center in a striking way. “Our North Star is that we want to focus on racial…
White Women: It’s Time to Rewrite Our Narrative as Anti-Racists
As a white woman from a conservative Pennsylvania town, I was disappointed but not shocked to learn that 53% of white women voters chose to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. My hope at the time…
#WealthInColor: Honeymoon Brewery [VIDEO]
In the first of our six-part #WealthInColor video series – featuring Black, Latinx and Native American founders – Ayla Bystrom-Williams of Honeymoon Brewery shares her entrepreneurial journey. She discusses the business landscape in New Mexico, the challenges of raising capital…
Capital for the New Majority: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]
What does it take to disrupt barriers to access to capital for people of color and shift who ultimately gets to grow and build wealth? At HBCU@SXSW we had a conversation with ecosystem builders and capital providers about how increasing…
What is a Community Data Portal and What Difference Can it Make?
A few years ago, I described the need our community of Louisville, KY had for a “third place” for data. At that time, government at all levels were in a boom of the deployment of Open Data portals for a wide range…
Putting Entrepreneurs of Color in the Center: What Ecosystems and City Government Can Do
Living Cities has been working with eight municipalities that are trying new approaches to address the fragmentation and barriers that founders of color experience in their communities. Like many cities, they recognize their local economy is weakened when their entrepreneurs…
Impact vs. Intent: Initial Lessons from Third Sector’s Equity Journey
What does a low-income community look like? What systems and programs, while often well-intentioned, serve as the foot of oppression for keeping this neighborhood economically poor? After conducting this power analysis as part of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s…