The Board of Streets.mn has published an Anti-Racism Vision Statement. Editor-in-Chief Micah Davison asked some questions of the Anti-Racism Committee about the statement and the process that led to it.
What is Streets.mn’s Anti-Racism Committee, and why is it needed?
The Anti-Racism Committee was founded back in 2020, spearheaded by former Streets.mn board member Tim Brackett. Following the murder of George Floyd, board members recognized a more urgent need to engage with the racism latent in Minnesota. In particular, the urbanism community is overwhelmingly white in an already white-majority state. This is in spite of the fact that land use and transportation issues frequently disproportionately negatively impact communities of color.
Although individual writers and their articles on the site over the years have explored how race impacts land use and transportation in the state, the goal of the Anti-Racism Committee is to ensure that the organization is investing time and resources into highlighting issues that affect communities of color, while making the organization more accessible to those communities.
The anti-racism vision statement has been a while in the making. Why was it important to spend the time creating that statement for Streets.mn rather than diving right into specific racial equity initiatives?
Crafting a vision statement for the organization was a central piece of advice given in the Racial Equity Analysis that Streets.mn commissioned last year. The vision statement was primarily crafted by the Anti-Racism Committee; it incorporates thoughts and feedback from many members of the organization, and was voted upon by the full board. By crafting a cohesive vision of what an anti-racist Streets.mn could be, we hope to better ensure a continuity of focus.
As a volunteer organization that frequently experiences member turnover, Streets.mn can struggle to maintain specific efforts long-term unless those efforts are embedded in our ways of working. We hope this statement helps keep the organization’s overall goals for anti-racism continuous, even as the board’s people and practices change. Furthermore, by publishing the vision statement on the site, we are keeping our operations transparent. We hope the audience of Streets.mn holds us accountable to this statement.
What was the easiest part of creating this vision statement? The hardest part?
Crafting this statement was made easier by the fact that some foundation already had been laid. In the past few years, practices like land acknowledgements have become more common, and many organizations have made statements on racial equity. The normalization of these practices uplifted and aided our work.
What was hard was getting full approval from the board, which took longer than expected but was also a rewarding experience. The initial schedule we laid out to produce this statement got extended by almost three months. With each phase of the approval process, engaged board members had more thoughts and opinions on the statement. For instance, the addition of language acknowledging intersectionality came late in the process at the suggestion of board members outside the Anti-Racism Committee. These additions required us to have more meetings to talk through and incorporate feedback, and the statement is better for us having listened and done that work.
How does or should this vision statement change how Streets.mn operates?
The vision statement is followed by a section that lists several programs and reforms Streets.mn is currently working on or plans to work on. For instance, we are beginning to table at events with the hope of spreading awareness of our organization into more communities, particularly communities of color. We also want to resume our Crosswalks program — which commissions articles from writers of color about topics specific to their communities — once we have the funds to do so. Programs like Crosswalks are part of why we kicked off our ongoing donation drive, so please give your support if you are able.
The Anti-Racism Committee will periodically update this section to be current with our goals and operations. This section represents our intention for this statement to not just be a static document we file away, but rather an active tool that we use to check our operations. We want this statement to direct our actions intentionally toward anti-racist means.
What should Streets.mn readers and supporters take away upon reading the vision statement, and about our larger aspirations toward racial equity?
As we wrote in the statement, an overriding goal for Streets.mn is to expand the readership, writership and volunteer base of the organization. We mean for this to result not only in a quantitative change in our operations — more readers and writers overall and more articles from people of color — but also a qualitative change to how we function. Presently, the majority of our editorial team and Board of Directors are white. We would want the changing demographics of our audience and our organization to change how we operate and how we direct our energy, in ways we can only speculate about now.
Learn More
The Streets.mn Anti-Racism Vision Statement can be found here. And please share your comments, thoughts or ideas with our editorial team at [email protected].
Photo of two children up top by Bump Opera photography and videography. With thanks to our colleagues at Our Streets.
Related
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66def208ac534ef7935c754c50bffc8b&url=https%3A%2F%2Fstreets.mn%2F2024%2F09%2F09%2Fanti-racism-vision-statement%2F&c=402242933873699322&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-09 01:00:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
