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…
Decolonizing Lunch Part I: Interrogating our Org Culture Around Food
This two-part series explores how we are living our value of racial equity and inclusion by interrogating and shifting the ways we approach food and catering as an organization. In this piece, read on for more about the relationship between…
Decolonizing Lunch Part II: Putting Our Values into Action
In the first piece of this two-part series, we explored the relationship between our racial equity practice and our procurement practices, and some of the questions we continue to grapple with in our journey. In this piece, one staff member…
Skills Development and Talent Placement: Reflections from HBCU@SXSW [PODCAST]
What does it take for companies to operationalize racial equity? At Opportunity Hub’s HBCU@SXSW we chatted with leaders in the tech field about how companies can support black and brown entrepreneurs through skills development and talent placement. Opportunity Hub (OHUB)…
What We’re Reading: A Terrible Thing to Waste, by Harriet A. Washington
Ten, twenty, one hundred times a day, I think about the end times. They are coming and I am terrified. In July, Alaska experienced record-high heat of 90 degrees Fahrenheit. A paper released by an Australian think tank laid out…
Building the Field: Reflections on Undoing Racism
We cannot address racial disparities without being clear about the historical, social and political meaning of race in America. As part of our internal racial equity work, Living Cities has asked all of our staff to attend racial equity trainings…