Melinda's Message 

Hello ARC community! It is a joy to connect with you on this summer day as I fill in for Rinku in today’s Toolbox.

Recently, I participated in an amazing gathering of leaders across the nation who are passionately creating a blueprint to advance a multifaith movement for justice. One of our sessions, “Healthy Ecosystems”, prompted us to examine nature’s way of organizing and by analogy, to evaluate how the justice work of various faith communities and institutions compare. For example, do we see resilience, capacity for adaptation, creative innovation, and vibrant abundance? Such are the characteristics of healthy ecosystems, and also of healthy social movements. We discussed that one of the ways Mother Nature sustains herself in such stunning fashion is by local, cooperative, ownership, control and decision-making. Simply put, healthy ecosystems – and healthy social movements – are organized from the bottom up!

In this month of celebrating LGBT Pride, our Toolbox is full of examples of those who are not only building from ground up, but breaking new ground as they do. Our Network and Research Departments collaborated closely to publish our third in a series report exploring the connection between the movement for racial justice and LGBTQ liberation. This time, we took it down South and learned from the experiences of four community-based organizations on the cutting edge of this work. As W.E.B. Dubois once said, “As goes the South, so goes the nation.” In this way, we would all do well to give our brothers and sisters in the South – and our report highlighting their justice work – a real good look.

Our Discussion Guide to the book, Behind the Kitchen Door, helps us consider the lives of those whose faces we see, but often overlook. In this collection of disruptive yet powerful stories, Restaurant Opportunities Center United’s Saru Jayaraman sheds light on how it is that our largest workforce is also our lowest paid – at $2.13/hour. We can change this! An important step on this road is to tell our stories – around the kitchen table, on the front porch, barbershop chair and everywhere until they inspire us to create a new and just reality for all.

Lastly, our resident storytellers at Colorlines are reporting some juicy news of their own that you don’t want to miss. Enjoy!

Colorlines Spotlight

The Colorlines team says a bittersweet goodbye to an old friend – and offers a hearty welcome to another.

Jorge Rivas has been part of the DNA of our community since its digital inception. He’s been in the mix at Colorlines and the Applied Research Center for nine years, doing just about everything – providing pop culture coverage that’s as fun as it is insightful; producing gorgeous video; laying out beautiful pages; and even fending off malware attacks. Colorlines.com would simply not exist without Jorge’s extraordinary efforts. He now joins one of the most buzzed about projects in news media – Fusion, a joint launch of ABC News and Univision. We’re thrilled to know he’ll be bringing the same racial justice lens he created at Colorlines to this exciting effort.

We also welcome home Aura Bogado. As a 2012 Colorlines editorial fellow, Aura helped lead our Voting Rights Watch project. Now she’s joining the team as a news editor and reporter, and we’re thrilled to bring her voice to the site daily. As both an editor and a reporter, her coverage of immigration, Native communities and progressive organizing, among other things, has been groundbreaking. We are delighted to welcome her to the team full time.

Research: Tips from Better Together 

The release of ARC’s Better Together in the South – the third in our series exploring the intersection of racial justice and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights and liberation – provides us with an occasion to review three research tips that guide our collection of data on topics of racial and social justice.

1. Gather and provide evidence that calls into question mainstream assumptions about people of color. For the first Better Together report, that meant challenging the unspoken notion “that LGBT identity and politics are for white people and [the misconception] that communities of color, housing few if any LGBT people themselves, are disproportionately homophobic" (p. 2). Similarly, just because Southern states appear to be progressive policy deserts, doesn’t mean there aren’t – in the words of Better Together in the South authors – “many flourishing oases of deep experience, courageous and creative organizing” in the region (p. 5).

2. Illustrate your findings, and present evidence visually whenever possible. By providing a map of the region, we could show that there were nevertheless movement and/or policy successes along with more publicized setbacks (p. 14-15). Here at ARC, we’ve recently had the talents of designers like Hatty Lee, Erin Zipper and Stefanie Liang, whom we try to involve as early in the research process as possible, to thank for our strong record. If you can’t work with your own designer, look for infographics on the same topic from partner organizations that are in the public domain.

3. Elevate the voices and stories of those individuals, groups and organizations combating racialized marginalization. The relationships and connections created and maintained by ARC staff over the years in various departments have been instrumental – like our partnership with committed organizations like Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Ideally these stories plant the seed of replication for others who think “they’re the only one” in their local or regional contexts. In the long run, such stories clearly document the need for more systematic collection of data.

Network: Supporting Healthy Kitchens

Some summer delights include reading and eating. There’s a new book about eating that’s well worth the read. Behind the Kitchen Door, by Saru Jayaraman, Co-Director of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-United), explores how poor working conditions – discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens – affect the meals at our restaurant tables. At stake is not only our own health, as diners, but also the health and well-being of 10 million people who work in the restaurant industry, including many immigrants and people of color. ROC-United has built a growing national grassroots movement of restaurant workers who are reaching across the food chain – connecting with food growers and diners – to build an even broader movement for justice that connects healthy eating with workers rights.

For more food for thought, ARC has compiled a companion Discussion Guide to go with the book, organized around themes such as race and gender discrimination, food justice and sustainability, immigrant rights and workers rights. If you belong to a social justice organization, religious group or book club, consider reading this book together and using the discussion guide as a springboard for reflection and action. The book can be ordered here and the discussion guide is available here.