By Sarah Mieras
A recent Arcus Foundation program is creating new alliances in the struggle to understand and eliminate racial and economic injustice. The recently launched Michigan Racial & Economic Justice Initiative aims to pull together community-based groups working toward similar goals in Kalamazoo.
"Most Michgian cities are more like Kalamazoo than Detroit or Grand Rapids," said Initiative Program Officer Johnny Jenkins. "Race is just an issue in Michigan period, in many ways Michigan is like the South."
Jenkins calls Kalamazoo the perfect pilot area for the Intitiative, describing it as small, divided by economic extremes, and home to a large African American population, a sizable Indian population and a growing population of undocumented workers.
Serving as the facilitator of the Initiative, Jenkins believes real change will emerge in short order from the group of 10 community organizations.
"I believe they can really create some change in this small town."
At the heart of the program is the development of strategies to empower residents to organize, voice their needs and ultimately create change in the community. Ultimately the Initiative aims to achieve a measurable reversal of racial and economic disparity trends.
The direction the Initiative takes will depend on the identification of commonalities between the groups.
Recent awards by the Foundation totaling $468,720 will fuel the groundbreaking effort, which has plans to eventually expand to other areas of the State.
The Michigan Organizing Project, which focuses on immigrant housing and health care issues, received $54,200 under the Initiative. The funds, said Executive Director John Musick, will allow the small organization to expand its staff.
"Until now I have been it for our staff. I do everything from clean the bathrooms to training and organizing," said Musick. "With this grant we can extend our work into the Spanish community."
The funds have already made an impact. Recently MOP's new organizer pulled together over 100 undocumented workers to attend a rally at the Kalamazoo City Hall to gather support for a resolution in favor of immigration reform.
The Initiative groups meet monthly, and according to Musick, the act of gathering leaders from different organizations is already working.
"In just a couple of months we have seen a dialogue and a sense of understanding develop. Some of the organizations at the table I didn't even know existed. This is going to have a huge impact on Kalamazoo."
For the anti-oppression organizing group Eliminating Racism and Claiming/Celebrating Equality (ERACCE) the Initiative has had an immediate impact by giving its operations a home. ERAC/CE received a total of $80,000 from Arcus this year, but it lacked an office to centralize its work.
"We were at a meeting and reported that we were working out of cars and garages, and several groups said they had space available," said ERACCE's Jo Ann Mundy.
Today the ERAC/CE has its own office suite inside the Douglas Community Association, which is located in the heart of Kalamazoo's North Side neighborhood. The DCA recently received $55,000 to continue its work empowering the residents of one of the City's most impoverished and overlooked neighborhoods.
At the heart of the success of the Initiative said the ERAC/CE's Art Hoekstra is the Arcus Foundation's innovative thinking and funding, that has pulled these groups together towards common goals.
"The people who originated and designed the systems and institutions of our society set them up to serve their own needs. The Arcus Foundation has been really successful, even from its earliest days before it had a building or a staff, at raising questions about fairness and justice for everyone in the Kalamazoo community."
"Arcus has really been a leader to say that there is an intersection of oppression that society has ignored," added Mundy. "All is a huge little word. And Arcus has said there are some things we haven't examined here."
The 10 pilot groups aren't the only ones learning through the Initiative. An experiment of sorts, the Foundation hopes to learn how to continue to fund and inspire change based on its mission.
"This effort is a learning effort for the Foundation, because our mission is still advancing social justice based on LGBT rights and race," said Jenkins. "The Initiative is teaching us how to work at the intersection. None of these groups have LGBT affiliations. I don't think the larger LGBT community thinks about the intersections with other communities enough."
The organizations participating in the Initiative include: ISAAC (Interfaith Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community), New Latino Visions, Northside Economic Potential Group, ERAC/CE, Hispanic American Council, Michigan Organizing Project, Kalamazoo Homeless Action Network, Boys and Girls Club of Kalamazoo, Northside Association for Community Development and Douglass Community Association.
