Is it possible to track systemic racism and its impact, specifically in terms of youth justice? That’s one of the questions Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is hoping to answer with the support of the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund (NCF) and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley.
The Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), headed by author and activist Ibram X. Kendi, works to develop “novel and practical ways to understand, explain and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” according to its website. With the new funding, CAR will focus on neighborhood and school-based policies that funnel Massachusetts youth into the criminal justice system. CAR previously created a national Racial Data Tracker to compile pandemic-related racial data. The new tool will focus more narrowly on discrepancies in the treatment of Massachusetts’ young people of color in schools and the criminal justice system.
CAR is a new grantee for the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund, which was founded in 2020 by a group of Black and brown business executives from Massachusetts. NCF’s goal is to support the state’s BIPOC entrepreneurs, innovators and nonprofits. These leaders and organizations have traditionally received only a small fraction of philanthropic funding, and NCF aims to close that racial funding gap, as my colleague Martha Ramirez reported in 2020.
NCF may be just a few years old, but it is making its mark: Since it was created, it has given close to $8 million to its nonprofit partners and provided support to 81 entrepreneurs, innovators and nonprofit leaders.
Makeeba McCreary, NCF’s first president, has been on the job for a year and a half and bristles with ideas and plans for potential partnerships. She recently approached Kendi to find out if CAR could design a tool to track state-level data on criminal justice and policing policy and its impact on Massachusetts youth. Kendi was enthusiastic about the idea. Next, she asked Bob Giannino, president and CEO of United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, if he wanted to join NCF in backing the project and he was immediately on board.
“One of the things that NCF really wants to illustrate and mirror is that we’re about being collaborative; nobody has to own a space,” McCreary said. “In particular, if we’re going to be successful in supporting the dismantling of systemic racism, whether it’s at the programmatic or policy level, we absolutely cannot go it alone.”
Together, NCF and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley are providing $600,000 to support the development of the new tool. “With this funding, the Massachusetts Racial Policy Tracker can analyze and challenge racially disparate policies that impact the young people in our most vulnerable communities,” Kendi said when the project was announced.
A Massachusetts model
The Center for Antiracist Research is just one of three new partners NCF is funding in its latest round of grants. NCF also committed $150,000 to the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology (BFIT) to encourage more students of color to pursue STEM education and careers. Seventy-four percent of BFIT students are young people of color and 45% are first-generation college students. The funding will underwrite programs to expose high school students to STEM opportunities and encourage future enrollment; it will also support scholarships. A third grantee, a coalition of more than 50 Black and Latino leaders called the Health Equity Compact, is pushing for health reform in the state.
NCF considers itself a partner in its funding relationships. McCreary believes in trust-based philanthropy and told me that she and her team work hard to build relationships with the nonprofits they work with, engaging in conversations to understand grantees’ strategies and goals. This means providing multiyear funding when possible. Last year, NCF provided an additional $3 million to 54 of its first cohort of nonprofit partners.
Building on its origins in the Massachusetts business community, NCF also connects nonprofit partners with corporate volunteers who provide capacity-building and technical assistance. “This kind of help has proven to be equally profound for the leaders we work with,” McCreary said. “Understanding how much legislative work they can get involved in, how to negotiate finances, how to think about filing with the state and the federal government, how to reorganize so they can scale their work — there is no handbook for that.”
“We’re planning to set up a more formal process going forward, but so far, it’s worked organically: We poll our grantees to find out what they want to learn, and we do some matchmaking. We’ve got some incredible people who have stepped forward as volunteers,” she said.
NCF is Massachusetts-based, but McCreary thinks its approach can serve as a model for other regions. “We believe this approach can be replicated, and it is already happening in a few other places,” she said. “There is real power when Black and brown leaders in the corporate sector step forward and say, ‘you know, we can raise the money to support our own communities.’’’
“A lot of right-sizing to do”
As the Center for Antiracist Research begins work on the new racial policy tracker, the goal is to use the findings to develop policy reports and model legislation to address inequities in the state’s youth justice system.
There is certainly a need — and not just in Massachusetts. Research demonstrates the link between harsh school discipline policies — particularly school suspension — and involvement in the criminal justice system. It also shows that students of color are most severely impacted. And a recent review of the evidence on youth incarceration by the Sentencing Project confirms that not only is incarcerating young people damaging and discriminatory, it doesn’t deter crime or increase public safety.
Meanwhile, the New Commonwealth Fund has big ambitions, and it’s been growing steadily since its inception. “We started with a corpus of $20 million after the first 12 months,” McCreary said. “We’re now close to $40 million, and my goal is to get us to $100 million within the next two years; we can do a lot with that. We believe that if you’re spinning off just 3% to 5% of your corpus to make grants, that means that you’re protecting 97% — for what reason? So I hope to spin off 10% of our corpus as soon as possible.”
She went on: “When we get to $100 million that will be $10 million that we’re putting out into Massachusetts [annually]. We’re targeting Black and brown nonprofit leaders and groups that have been consistently underfunded, so we’ve got a lot of right-sizing to do.”