Giving Compass' Take:

• The Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity program aims to provide communities with the resources and tools needed to solve systemic racial issues as well as tackle health and social, economic, equity problems along the way. 

• The most important component of the fellowship is that they do not seek to solve issues themselves but provide people with encouragement and resources to mobilize and solve their own problems. How can other philanthropists/organizations emulate the same approach to social change?  

• Read about how New York teachers are bringing the Black Lives Matter movement into classrooms. 

Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza launched the Black Futures Lab (BFL) as a way to bring the needs of black communities–and policies that will support them–to the political forefront.

Her first initiative under BFL is the currently underway Black Census, a wide-ranging survey designed to quantify the needs of black communities across the country.  The initiative arose from an understanding, cemented via conversations with other racial equity fellows, that part of what keeps racial equity out of reach is a lack of political understanding or will to counter it.

She’s doing this as part of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity program, which introduced its first cohort of fellows last November. It includes 29 activists, scholars, lawyers, artists, and other leaders from both the U.S. and South Africa–two countries dealing with extreme forms of racial inequity.

Today, seven cohorts of fellows across the world are at work on issues ranging from racial equity to social and economic equity to health equity. The organization recently announced that the program has now grown to 267 fellows worldwide, and will continue to expand over the next several decades.

The Fellows are not interested in easy fixes; the goal of the program, rather, is to give people the tools and resources to get to the bottom of systemic issues, like health and racial inequities, and to build out systemic, transformative solutions. The fact that those solutions may not materialize until long after Atlantic Philanthropies closes its doors testifies to the fact that the organization’s goal was never self-satisfaction: It’s about using its resources to create necessary change for the future.

Read the full article about Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity Program by Eillie Anzilotti at Fast Company