Racial Equity Community of Practice

The Racial Equity Community of Practice (CoP) is based on a simple premise: without equity there can be no resilience. A coalition of urban resilience practitioners with community, corporate, philanthropic and academic leaders, this CoP seeks to achieve effective racial equity by enhancing urban resilience. Born in 2020 as a response to Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd, the CoP provides a space for Chief Resilience Officers (CROs) to connect and examine the realities and impacts of systemic racism through monthly discussions and presentations, and offer support and encouragement through the sharing of best practices, tools, and experiences with a specific focus on anti-black racism in North America.

The year 2020 offered boundless examples of what city practitioners have always known- when crises hit, the people who suffer the most are the poorest and most vulnerable. Individuals in these communities are disproportionately harmed by emergencies and, all too often, by poorly designed city services. The years since have continued to underscore this reality, as overlapping public health and climate crises have exposed the deep inequities faced black and brown communities across North America and the ways in which these inequities compound the negative impacts of urban shocks and stresses.

Leaders across sectors often consider racial equity to be an outcome or a goal, and it is indeed a critical one. Racial equity, however, is also a process and values systems, a way of doing our work. Our daily decisions, actions and processes must be actively anti-racist in the same way our long-term goals must be. The work of the Racial Equity CoP is to center the question of whether it is possible to transform our systems without tearing them down, and whether there is value in keeping existing systems despite the inequitable outcomes they generate. Topics addressed in previous sessions have ranged from inequities in healthcare to barriers to political presentation. As a practitioner-led and practice-based community, the Racial Equity CoP is committed to working together to answer these questions, because the status quo is unacceptable, and recovery alone is never enough.

Participating Cities