In late 2018, the Foundation announced its commitment to advancing racial equity across all of our work in Forsyth County. Data shows that in our community, race serves as a reliable predictor of an individual’s educational, health, and economic outcomes. Though there are many other forms of identity including gender, age, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation, we are committed to focusing explicitly on race at this time because of the pervasive role it plays in determining an individual’s life outcomes.
We want to ensure that we become a community where race no longer predicts life outcomes.
While data reveals racial gaps when it comes to poverty, household income, academic performance, and health, we recognize that systems – the institutions, policies, and resource allocation in our community—have played a major role in this data and that we must focus on these systems to affect real change. Individual programs and projects are not enough to improve outcomes, as systems do not perform equally well for different groups.
We believe our two focus areas for community investment—Building an Inclusive Economy and Advancing Equity in Education—are crucial to ensuring that we become a community where race no longer predicts life outcomes. We are committed to analyzing history, policies, and institutional structures within these two areas and to developing desired outcomes that speak explicitly to racial equity in order to measure and evaluate progress.
We also recognize that we are an institution with great privilege and responsibility and that we cannot successfully apply a racial equity lens to our focus area work without turning the lens inward. We have committed to analyzing our internal policies, practices, and behaviors and to asking not when, but how race shows up in our office culture. Our entire staff shares a responsibility for this work, and we have created a working group specifically focused on racial equity to ensure ongoing attention and progress. We are committed to thinking and acting in a way that is accountable to the communities we serve and sustains the advancement of racial equity for many years to come.
