Dear Friend,

Race Forward is excited to share our latest report: Monterey County: From Disenfranchisement to Voice, Power, and Participation. The report details the experiences and initiatives of the Building Healthy Communities (BHC) East Salinas Collaborative, which reimagined a community-driven collaboration and redefined the power dynamic between government, community organizations, and philanthropy.

The report is a continuation of Race Forward’s 2017 work on Building the We: Healing-Informed Governing for Racial Equity, which highlighted the work that leaders from across different sectors were doing to address mounting racial and economic tensions in Salinas. In the two years following the release of Building the We, the BHC Collaborative learned that closing racial equity gaps takes an ecosystem approach that works across sectors for better alignment, trust building, and program implementation. 

Through this process, collaborative partners identified three essential elements of systems change:

Community Accountability: holding local institutions accountable for making progress with tools and processes to ensure government leaders are held to a standard of progress.

Culture Shift: calling for greater transparency and vulnerability from institutional partners, and centering the values, needs, and cultural diversity of the community.

Authentic Partnership for Real Solutions: institutional partners are grounded in the root causes of the challenges community members face, in order to authentically engage in the collaborative development of solutions.

Read the report, and watch the accompanying video which explores key questions that may inform racial equity efforts in other communities across the country. What does it take to engage in authentic collaboration? How do government agencies repair the harms they’ve exacerbated in Black and Brown communities and build a new path towards an equitable future?

Share our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and support our mission to advance racial justice with a donation to Race Forward today.