As a scholar who studies the science of social change, I spend a lot of time talking to philanthropists. Sometimes I leave those conversations feeling like they care more about controlling the solutions than solving the problems. In many cases, philanthropists are unwilling to confront hard questions about how to create truly resilient solutions.

Consider racial injustice. Its scale and complexity can be overwhelming — rooting out its insidious tentacles requires changing everything from individual attitudes and behaviors to the structures, policies, and practices of most societal institutions. Philanthropists often like to focus on top-down nudges or policy solutions. Yet these ignore the consistent history of backlash in American politics that stymies any sweeping change, and the unintended consequences that result when strategic actors manipulate institutional reforms to their own ends. History teaches us that making gains resilient to changing political winds requires a public committed to them.

But how do you generate (and sustain) public will, especially in the face of intentional and unintentional attempts to stoke innate prejudice? I examined this question in my book Undivided, about the Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, the nation’s third-largest church, a predominantly white evangelical community. From 2016 to 2022, I traced a group of congregants, Black and white, organizing around racial justice through a Crossroads program called Undivided. I found Undivided because of its unexpected role in a 2016 municipal ballot initiative designed to raise taxes for universal preschool with targeted resources for Cincinnati’s poorest Black communities. In an election that was otherwise marked by divisiveness, Undivided volunteers — Black and white people of faith — helped propel this initiative to victory.

What made this possible? The answer was no nudge, policy, or magic bullet. Even the Undivided curriculum, a six-week program that taught topics common to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — implicit bias, the history of structural disparities, empathy, and so on — was not unusual. Instead, its uniqueness was in creating a vehicle through which people could struggle directly with basic human questions about race in the messy reality of their lives.

‘Belonging Before Belief’

Consider Jess, a white woman who grew up with a father who had the word “White” tattooed on one arm and “Power” tattooed on the other. For most of her life, she never 800had the opportunity to do more than wonder why the nonwhite people she encountered as teachers, friends, and peers did not conform to the white supremacist stereotypes her father taught. With trepidation, she decided to try Undivided, but knew only enough to know how much she did not know.

Read the full article on The Chronicle of Philanthropy.