Applying a Racial Equity Lens Skills and Strategies
1. Get People Talking
“What we’re finding,” said a grantmaker whose foundation has embarked on an explicit course of racial equity grantmaking in education, “is that we’re getting more people and different people to the table. By engaging in this conversation, we’re getting people who would have been afraid on their own to come forward” to talk about racial disparities in student performance.
2. Encourage New Approaches
Making a public commitment to racial equity grant making can stimulate innovation. As a grantmaker working in education reform recalled, after learning that arrests are disproportionately common in schools with heavy concentrations of minority students, she began to ask grantees if they saw a connection between arrests and academic achievement. Those questions led to projects exploring the impact of arrests on the school experience of youth of color.
Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.
This takeaway was derived from Grantmaking with a Racial Equity Lens.
