Advancing Solutions That Close Disparities

The data are consistent: increasing racial equityand strengthening social justice remain challenges to our society. But closing gaps or disparities in racial equity requires good ideas – ideas that address the underlying causes of a particular disparity, ideas that can be realistically implemented.

Barriers to progress include:

Promising solutions for furthering social justice and closing disparities or gaps in racial equity are too often thwarted or under-supported.
The dominant model of philanthropy – charity rather than development – keeps society from “looking upstream” to create good solutions to the root causes of social problems, and instead keeps many agencies busy with addressing the needs of victims one at a time.
Not everyone wants to see solutions. For some, there are real advantages to doing nothing.
Many good ideas or solutions have been proposed but collect dust on the shelf or whither on the vine, dying for lack of support or momentum.
Moving a good idea from conception to implementation can be a long haul, with resistance or inertia encountered along the way.
Good ideas coming from the African American community (unlike those coming from the White community) are more likely to be dismissed as “biased” or “self-serving,” if they’re even seen at all.
The forces that resist a good idea are the same that maintain the disparities. Good ideas that can reduce the mortgage-application disparity, for example, are resisted by those who [think they] benefit from that disparity.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of energy for creating promising solutions that can close gaps in equity, but they have to be surfaced and advanced, and allowed to gather momentum to successful implementation and fruition.

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

This page updated 11 August 2008