Strengthening Relationships, Networks and Leadership

• The Challenge
• Promising Practices
• Benchmarks

The data are consistent: increasing racial equity and strengthening social justice remain challenges to our society. But closing gaps or disparities in racial equity requires that people come together to support change, especially the kinds of solutions that will close these gaps.

Sometimes called “social capital,” Relationships are essential to discuss conditions, and to surface and promote opportunities for improvement. Relationships among like-minded people can grow into networks of people, useful for advancing solutions. Leadership, especially across cultural and geographic divides, is essential to gain support for solutions and advance them toward successful implementation.

Barriers to progress:

• The legacy of Jim Crow -- fear against coming together in common cause to explore problems and advance solutions -- is still strong, inhibiting the full development of social capital. The risk of intimidation is still part of the collective memory of African Americans, which regrettably serves to keep down the spirit and energy needed to forge ahead.
• The networks of support to develop leadership in minority communities are not well-enough developed to advance the solutions needed to produce more equitable development. A major part of “white privilege” is the extensive networks of support used, intentionally or not, to protect or advance personal interests, interests that too often maintain disparities. The local and national professional associations that gather daily in our nation’s hotel and conference facilities are the arenas where progress in equity is made, or resisted.
• The relationships, networks and leadership in minority communities that can advance good ideas are often only partially visible – and even less well understood -- to predominantly white philanthropic organizations.
• Trust, of the kind that comes from respectful listening and talking, is an essential but insufficiently widespread commodity for bridging racial divides so that we can create and implement solutions beneficial to all.
• The leadership that can knit communities and agendas strong enough to close gaps is in woefully short supply.
• The costs of supporting networks, if not borne by commercial interests, must be borne by the community, either through government or through philanthropy. In rural areas especially, the costs of travel or long-distance communications needed to advance good ideas are significant.

Fortunately, when leadership is built on relationships grounded in trust, it can lead to expanding networks of influence. Leadership that “crosses divides” of various kinds – geographic, cultural, generational and racial – helps create a growing base of support for raising resources, implementing solutions and closing the gaps.
 

Click on Promising Practices to see how these challenges can be addressed.

This page last updated 11 August 2008