Areas of Work
Reducing Racism
Contact: Sally Leiderman
Current systems providing services to children and families frequently offer only piecemeal solutions to complex social problems. The barriers to putting best practices in place on a broad scale are often cited: categorical and/or short-term ("soft money") funding, disciplinary and agency boundaries and turf issues, focus on targeting particular problems or crises for children and families rather than supporting holistic approaches, accountability for service delivery rather than outcomes, difficulty in convincing policy makers and the general public to support long-term multi-dimensional solutions to complex issues, reluctance to raise societal factors such as institutional racism and cultural pluralism, and difficulties in balancing community-driven "bottom up" strategies with centralized "top down" approaches. Some of the strategies that have been developed to overcome these barriers include integrated fund pools or funding streams, cross-agency and/or community-wide collaborations, cross-disciplinary training and service delivery teams, focus on long-term community-wide outcomes, public education and advocacy efforts, and Racism continues to be one of the most significant challenges for children, adolescents, families, communities and ????? institutions. Racism limits all of us; it creates barriers among potential partners working to solve other problems and denies the nation the potential of all its citizens. In addition, racism continues to have an independent effect (apart from the effect of poverty, for example) on the economic, educational and physical well-being of people. Efforts to ameliorate the effects of racism consume substantial public and private resources of time, energy and money, and are never wholly successful.
Some people believe that racism and its effects have declined in America. In fact, hate groups are on the rise: there was a 20% increase from 1996 to 1997 (per Southern Poverty Law Center). Further, there continue to be sharp differences in rates of, for example, birth weights, infant mortality, high school graduation, home ownership, median family income, capital accumulation, business ownership and life-span by race and ethnicity.
No one knows what it will take to eliminate racism in America or globally, since it has never been done. Promising efforts are focusing on many different aspects of the work, including analyses of privilege, denial, oppression, internalized oppression and institutional racism; community dialogue processes; targeted institutional strategies; and efforts to strengthen and support current anti-racism leaders and build additional leadership capacity. There are many "categorical" projects but very few comprehensive ones. Thus, there is still a great deal to try and to learn in this field.evelopment of institutional and/or political "champions" for change.
Related Web Sites:
- Center for Third World Organizing
- Cyber Watch
- Poverty and Race Action Center
- Project Change
- Renewing Democracy Through Interracial/Multicultral Community Building
- Southern Law Poverty Center
