Enslavement
. Black Codes. Jim Crow. Segregation. Gentrification. 

This country has a long history of developing systemically backed strategies that displace 
and disadvantage black and brown residents from access to affordable and safe neighborhoods. To build equity in access to housing, the industry needs disruptors – individuals who will find innovative and consistent solutions that can help tear down, abolish, and redevelop strategies, and programs. 

It’s time to move from understanding to action because racism can’t live here.

Learn More About The Four-Part Series

Whether you are a banker seeking to create more opportunity, a property manager or resident services professional looking to operate from a place of increased understanding, a real estate developer who wants to build more inclusive communities, or an architect who wants to design more equitably, this series will provide you with the support needed to begin a plan to disrupt racism and inequities within housing. 

In addition, each session will include self-reflective work guided by a toolkit that will help you develop your own action plan. This roadmap will help you find where your strengths can be used to disrupt racism in housing and create equitable, accessible, and safe neighborhoods.


30/30 Experience
January 13, 2022 | 10:00am  – 1:00pm | Virtual Webcast

As community development professionals, many of our organizations are in the business of serving low-income individuals and families, but many of us have never experienced firsthand the challenges that our neighbors – who are in large part communities of color – navigate on a daily basis. In the first session, HAND invites you to participate in United Way of Central Maryland’s 30|30 Experience. This 90-minute online session reveals why so many hardworking people can’t make ends meet. Participants in this immersive experience will assume the identity of a low-wage earner with a family, and make 30 decisions over 30 days—decisions that will affect you and your household. 

For those who haven’t experienced financial hardships firsthand, this can be helpful in understanding the difficult obstacles and choices vulnerable families face every day. This experience illuminates just what they’re up against—and what community members and stakeholders are doing to help.

 

Making Racial Equity a Reality in America’s Hypersegregated Cities
Featuring Dr. Lawrence Brown
February 10, 2022 | 10:00am  – 1:00pm | Virtual Webcast

Building on the content of the second session, Making Racial Equity a Reality in America’s Hypersegregated Cities will bring these important conversations to a more local level, examining the communities in our own backyard.

Starting with a rapid overview of the legacies of urban apartheid in Richmond, Washington DC, and Baltimore, Dr. Brown will discuss how housing and neighborhoods are co-constituents of the ongoing legacy of hypersegregation. With this backdrop in mind, Dr. Brown will cover the five steps that are needed to make racial equity a reality in housing, neighborhoods, and cities.

Dr. Lawrence T. Brown is an equity scientist, urban Afrofuturist, and author of The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America. He is currently leading the Black Butterfly Rising Initiative and serving as a research scientist in the new Center for Urban Health Equity at Morgan State University.

 

Redlining and “Urban Renewal” Projects:
The Long Legacy of Racial Residential Segregation in the United States
Featuring Dr. Angie Luvara
March 10, 2022 | 10:00am  – 1:00pm | Virtual Webcast

Even though our population is increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, very few cities in the United States have become more integrated since the 1970s. The vast majority, in contrast, are becoming even more racially segregated. Redlining is often pointed to as one cause of these increasing disparities, but redlining was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 and has not been a practice since.

Utilizing Critical Race Theory as a framework, in this session, we will trace the long legacy of redlining from the 1930s to the present. We will examine other forms of racial housing injustice, such as some “urban renewal” projects, as well as realtor practices like blockbusting and steering, which continue to uphold redlining’s legacy to this day. We will learn how all of these practices weave together to create our current issues surrounding racial residential segregation. 

The information in this session will help participants understand the systemic and historical nature of these particular housing issues, which will enable practitioners to address today’s issues holistically, considering and tending to these systemic and historical roots. 

Dr. Angie Luvara is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Frostburg State University in western Maryland. The roots of her anti-racist praxis are in her hometown of Keyser, West Virginia. 

 

We Gon’ Be Alright – Race and Resegregation in Today’s America
Featuring Jeff Chang
April 13, 2022 | 10:00am  – 1:00pm | Virtual Webcast

After so much unrest and tragedy—in Dallas, Minnesota, Baton Rouge, Charlottesville, and across the nation—how can our communities heal? And in the aftermath of the Trump administration, what can we expect for race relations in a changing, polarized America? In this talk, Jeff Chang further explores the thoughts and ideas set out in his new book We Gon’ Be Alright, which The Washington Post calls “the smartest book of the year.” Police violence, mass incarceration, and issues of race and representation in Hollywood plague us. The idea of a diverse and inclusive society is besieged from the Midwest to the White House to Twitter. And resegregation—the increasing division of Black and white people across housing, education, and more—is quietly pushing us back to pre-Brown-vs.-Board-of-Education days. But to Chang, not all is lost. If we can unseat policies of resegregation, which activist groups like Black Lives Matter are helping to do, we join the great fight of our time—the fight to establish America as a thriving, prosperous, equitable place for all.

Jeff Chang serves as a Senior Advisor at Race Forward. He was formerly the Vice President of Narrative, Arts, and Culture there, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Recently, Chang was named to the Frederick Douglass 200 as one of “200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.” He has written for The Nation, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, N+1, Mother Jones, Salon, Slate, Buzzfeed, and Medium, among many others.

 

Registration is closed. Discover Racism Can’t Live Here, a collection of learnings from this series and guidance for moving from understanding to action! Or, visit our Racial Equity Resource Center to learn more about HAND’s Racial Equity Programming. 

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