“We’re moving beyond DEI (bodies at the table), racial equity (measuring POC against white people), and perhaps even racial justice (the righting of racial wrongs), to an actual focus on what Black people need to thrive (building pro-Black),” Cyndi Suarez writes in the latest issue of NonProfit Quarterly (NPQ). “These parallel realities exist right now. But there is a gap between the leaders of color and radical white conspirators at the edge—and the funders who claim to be.”

“At the end of 2021, NPQ convened an advisory committee on racial justice and asked the question: What is the edge of current racial justice work? The group converged around “building pro-Black organizations,”.

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“Our work here in Chinatown,” Yin Kong, director and co-founder of Think!Chinatown, says, “Is about place-keeping. It’s about celebrating, strengthening and amplifying,” in an interview with NextCity. The article continues, “For a neighborhood relatively compact in size — Chinatown covers roughly two square miles in Lower Manhattan — it boasts an impressive and dedicated collective of cultural organizers,” and more than $200 million announced in public dollars just in the past two years, after decades of “pigeon-holing” and insufficient funding.

“The questions are urgent, and resonate far beyond Chinatown: When the cultural and artistic work has long been under-resourced and marginalized by institutional and government funders, how should that money be distributed when it finally comes in? What are the trade-offs for government and establishment funding — and are they worth it?”

Read more here.

In a new report, “Pulse Checking Progress Toward Operationalizing REI: Arts, Culture & Healing,” from LivingCities revisits learnings and progress from internal racial equity work over the part five years in response to a 2017 internal learning report, “What Does it Take to Embed a Racial Equity & Inclusion Lens?”

“There were twelve themes we uncovered in our scan of practices being used by organizations to operationalize racial equity,” the authors, Hafizah Omar and Joanna Carrasco, explain in the Pulse Check. “These twelve recommendations have guided our internal racial equity work in the last five years and we want to update you on what we have learned along the way and what we are continuing to test and practice.”

Read the recommendations and progress report here.

“Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival,” Filmmaker magazine reported this January leading up to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. “Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges.”

“After spending the last two decades leveraging the power of documentary film, I understood the power — and the limits — of what a single film can accomplish,” said Color Congress co-founder Sonya Childress in a press release. “Today’s existential challenges require a sea-change in thought and action; so to truly catalyze social change we need robust cinema authored by people closest to the most critical issues of our time. By supporting the organizations that nurture filmmakers of color, we can ensure impactful nonfiction storytelling will flourish.”

Read the full story here.