Many groups focus their work on a particular set of outcomes, for example, decreasing infant mortality in a city – knowing that, infant mortality disproportionately affects some racial groups more than others. The work toward building trusting relationships and collective action might be a response to hate crimes, or as part of an effort to organize for political action.

Regardless, groups who do this work share some common lessons. They note that community change work often includes engaging formal and informal leaders who will invest in the process, and serve as messengers and catalysts for change. They also note that part of designing a complex community change effort or supporting an organic community change process involves understanding the community’s history and culture, and the areas where change can be leveraged. They attend to the processes of their work – trying to mirror equity, and identifying ways that the dominant culture and white privilege may be influencing the initiative’s goals, strategies and definitions of success. They are explicit about structural racism. And they pay a great deal of a [...]