Tools You Can Use to Advance Racial Justice
The Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity is a tool developed by the Applied Research Center to grade state lawmakers and examine legislative impacts on communities of color.
Progress toward racial justice can be hard to measure. What is equity? How do we know we’re making progress?
We hope you can join us at this year's CSTI to address these questions.
We are excited that the Applied Research Center will hold a workshop on “Racial Justice Report Cards: Tools for Advancing Racial Justice in Public Policy” on Friday, July 30 at CSTI. Attendees can learn about one of several tools and gain strategies for negotiating the difficult terrain of these issues and broadening understanding of them.
The Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity is a tool developed by the Applied Research Center (ARC) to grade state lawmakers and examine legislative impacts on communities of color. This tool has been used by eight states across the country, three of them in our region.
In 2009 and 2010, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, Idaho Community Action Network and Washington Community Action Network for the first time produced a Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity for their respective states. The report cards enable these groups to hold their elected officials accountable and to shine a light on laws that at first appear “harmless” but in fact have significant negative impacts on communities of color.
The process of creating these report cards also opened opportunities for these organizations to dialogue with other progressive groups in the state on what racial equity looks like and how to create shared benchmarks to measure progress.
The Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity is one of many tools for advancing racial justice. To read more about other tools go to our Racial Equity Tools web page.
The CSTI “Report Cards" workshop will be facilitated by Tammy Johnson, Director of Strategic Partnership, and Terry Keleher, Program Director of the Racial Justice Leadership Action Network, both of ARC. Tammy and Terry will also present a “Naming, Framing and Explaining Structural Racism” workshop on Saturday, July 31. Click here to register for CSTI today!
