The Redstone Center's Anti-Racist Action Agenda
Redstone Global Center
Anti-Racist Action Agenda
To fulfill our mission, the Redstone Global Center is committed to becoming an anti-racist organization. In 2020, the center developed an action agenda as a starting point to guide our work. Racism and white supremacy and the trauma they induce are public health issues. We cannot ensure the health and wellbeing of all until white supremacy and the racist structures that support it are dismantled, and equity is achieved for all people and across all sectors, including health, criminal justice, economic opportunity, and education.
Vision
Washington, DC will be the healthiest capital in the world, characterized by optimal well-being for all residents, regardless of race, gender, class, ability or place of residence.
Rationale
Racism and white supremacy are public health issues. Trauma, resulting from racism and white supremacy experienced at the individual, community and societal levels and driving poor population health outcomes, is a public health issue. We cannot ensure the health and wellbeing of all until white supremacy and the racist structures that support it are dismantled, and equity is achieved for all people and across all sectors, including health, criminal justice, economic opportunity, and education. To fulfill our mission, the Redstone Global Center is committed to becoming an anti-racist organization. In pursuit of this vision, the Center recognizes that it is not the responsibility of our colleagues of color to lead our shared anti-racism work or solely hold the organization accountable for following through on these commitments.
To continue progress and uphold our commitment, the following actions are intended as a starting point to guide our organizational work, and may evolve and grow as our work to become an anti-racist organization continues.
Actions
- Maintain accountability and transparency in our progress to become an anti-racist organization. The Redstone Global Center will establish accountability and transparency measures to routinely assess and share our progress in becoming an anti-racist organization.
- Ensure talent-focused policies and practices are anti-racist. The Redstone Global Center will be an organization that actively recruits, hires, trains and supports the academic and professional development of individuals from a diversity of backgrounds and lived experience.
- Foster an anti-racist organizational culture. The Redstone Global Center will be an organization that is welcoming, caring, trauma-informed and inclusive, supports all staff members, and actively participates in our local community. We will ensure that staff members calling for change, raising concerns, or identifying problems have the support necessary to be heard safely.
- Amplify diverse voices and perspectives. The Redstone Global Center will endeavor to use our relational power to encourage partner organizations to center racial equity in their work. We will prioritize work with partners who have committed to and are actively engaged in anti-racist work, with organizations and individuals led by people of color, and participate in events featuring diverse participants and/or audiences.
- Incorporate anti-racist principles and practice in our research and advocacy. The Redstone Global Center will pursue lines of work, including research and policy advocacy, that further the goals of equity and dismantling racist systems, structures, and practices.
- Apply an equity lens to financial decisions (expenditures/investments and incoming funding sources). As part of our commitment, the Redstone Center will take action where possible to ensure procurement processes, investments and grant opportunities are aligned with our anti-racist vision.
- Examine and challenge the practices, policies and procedures that reinforce white supremacy and racism within the Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University, the District of Columbia, the United States and beyond. The Redstone Global Center operates within a larger organization. As such, the Center has an opportunity and obligation to not only create an equitable and anti-racist internal culture, but also to advocate for the same within GWSPH and GWU.