This week, The Century Foundation announced The Bridges Collaborative, a grassroots effort to improve racial and socioeconomic integration and equity that involves 56 organizations, including 27 school districts of various sizes, geographies and student demographics.

Several charter schools and housing organizations will work with the school districts to build support for integration efforts and serve as a resource center for successful approaches.

Equal educational opportunities between students of color and White students have not been achieved even six decades after the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, say the initiative's creators. The initiative comes as COVID-19 and heightened awareness of racial injustices have highlighted disparate impacts on students of color.

Even though there is growing support to have students attend schools with peers from different social, economic and racial backgrounds, progress on this front has stalled, and it is often difficult for local communities to work in isolation toward these goals, said the collaborative’s creators.

“Historically, successful social movements and civil rights advances are only achieved when you bring together people from different backgrounds, to share challenges and successes, in a broad-based, multi-racial, multi-class coalition,” wrote Bridges Collaborative Director Stefan Lallinger in an email. Lallinger is also the grandson of Louis Redding, a member of the legal team that argued the Brown case in favor of school desegregation.

Read the full article about desegregation efforts by Kara Arundel at Education Dive.