Network News 

"In 2007, the Barr Foundation agreed to subject itself to a new diagnostic for foundations that was developed by the Applied Research Center and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity (see: “Barr Foundation Racial Justice Analysis”). Its purpose was to help foundations like Barr – places that have vision statements that speak about justice – to gauge the extent to which we were actually approaching our work with a structural lens.

…Since that initial racial justice assessment at Barr, we have revisited all our strategies and become explicit about race in our analysis and through more targeted solutions. For example, in our education work, we now focus attention to the specific geographic places and specific populations in the city where achievement disparities are the most pronounced."

You can access ARC’s and PRE’s report called Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment.

Colorlines Spotlight

On Monday, April 21, our editorial team emerged from its weekly planning meeting ready for a busy week--the Senate’s immigration reform bill was set to drop. A few hours later, a bomb exploded at the Boston Marathon. Over the ensuing days, our colleagues in the old and new media alike demonstrated journalism both at its best--and at its worst. As Sally Kohn writes for Colorlines, news media plays a crucial role in checking our prejudices in moments like these. Too many failed to do so last week.

At Colorlines, we did our best to offer context. Rinku Sen shared her own tools for coping with “the cycle of sorrow, panic, defense and more sorrow that every incident of mass violence evokes.” Only through naming the cycle can we avoid the mistakes it spawns. Seth Freed Wessler reminded us that if the Boston bombs derail immigration reform, as some senators have suggested, we’ll be repeating history. And we pulled from our archives Terry Keleher’s moving letter to his son, Nathan, on the meanings of 9/11. We hope you’ll find these essays useful.

Oh, and we still covered the immigration bill. Check out Seth’s blog series, in which he combed through all 844 pages to identify key questions and answers.

Applying Our Research 

The Research Department continues its search to fill a senior research associate position with a highly qualified, committed and engaging individual, who would work from the Oakland, CA office, or remotely in the Southern United States. Applicants for this position must have completed a PhD in a social science or other field of study that has provided the candidate with advanced qualitative and/or quantitative research skills. As this is a rolling search, strong candidates should send application materials (in accordance to the advertisement on ARC's website) to [email protected] at their earliest convenience.

In the meantime, ARC Research will contribute substantively to Colorlines.com coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Fisher v. Texas once the likely divided opinions on the affirmative action case are published. The department is also currently engaged in preliminary work on our Race and Low-wage Work project.

The Best Practices document on Asian American, Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander data and research, originally slated for April co-release with the National Council of Asian Pacific American, has been re-scheduled for July.