Fighting Epidemics, Old and New

Poster by The Wellbeing Project, Amplifier Art, Dale Lendl 

In the wake of mass protests against racist police violence and turmoil over the COVID-19 pandemic, the SSIR team has the luxury of being able to step back and ask how we can use our website to magnify calls for systemic change. We don’t have reporters on staff, but we work with many writers and have a deep archive of material on race, justice, and social movements. We have rounded up a number of SSIR articles and external resources into a reading list, “The Struggle to Overcome Racism.”

The collection includes a recent piece by Stanford University psychologists discussing their research on racial bias:

“In our work, we have found that helping people perceive how race is ‘done’ in society—and then mapping how racial disparities are also ‘done’—can empower them to devise strategies and solutions to ‘undo’ racism.”

Funding Equity

“Undoing” racism is a goal that the philanthropic sector is increasingly taking to heart by assessing its own practices. Racial bias runs through foundations in the same way it permeates American society. In the article “Overcoming the Racial Bias in Philanthropic Funding,” Cheryl Dorsey, Peter Kim, Cora Daniels, Lyell Sakaue, and Britt Savage write:

 

“Among organizations in Echoing Green’s Black Male Achievement fellowship, which focuses on improving the life outcomes of Black men and boys in the United States, the revenues of the Black-led organizations are 45 percent smaller than those of the white-led organizations, and the unrestricted net assets of the Black-led organizations are a whopping 91 percent smaller than those of the white-led organizations—despite focusing on the same work. ... Without taking active antiracist measures to ensure equity in funding for the entire social sector, philanthropists inadvertently contribute to inequities in society.”

Data on the Disease

The long-standing inequities roiling our nation were made even more evident by COVID-19. Among the many articles SSIR published as part of “Rethinking Social Change in the Face of Coronavirus,” our special series on civil society’s response to the pandemic, one explored a novel integration of data to understand the impact of the disease on Black Americans. Yael Caplan, Nick Stewart, Peter Smittenaar, and Sema K. Sgaier write:

 

“The data we have woven together to create the COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI) confirm a sadly familiar and alarming truth: Community-level vulnerability to this pandemic is intrinsically tied to race because of the systemic inequities that pervade the United States. But these data also help identify precise solutions, from neighborhood-level investments in cities to targeted testing strategies in rural areas, to help Black Americans as they disproportionately bear the burden of this crisis.”

Preventing Burnout

Burnout, physical and mental illness, and breakdowns in relationships can easily grow in the soil of stressful situations made worse by limited resources. They cannot and should not be ignored, if not for personal reasons, then for the greater good—a connection explored in the year-long series “Centered Self: The Connection Between Inner Well-Being and Social Change,” published in partnership with The Wellbeing Project, IDR, The Skoll Foundation, and Schwab Foundation.

In the launch article for the series, researchers Linda Bell Grdina, Nora Johnson, and Aaron Pereira write:

“At the heart of our research was the question of how change makers’ inner well-being influences how social change happens. Our results were exciting: Our research shows a clear connection between the inner well-being of change makers and the way social change happens.”

What stories will we continue to tell about racial equity? About the pandemic? About civil society’s response? About inner well-being?

Read more stories by M. Amedeo Tumolillo.