Economic Empowerment Project
Community equity requires stable jobs that provide living wages, benefits, and opportunities for advancement and wealth-building; affordable, safe and quality housing that afford physical access to networks and opportunity; access to non-exploitative financial services, and access to investment capital and long-term financial investments. The Economic Empowerment Project of the Community Equity Lab works to increase access to the tools of an economically vibrant life, both for individuals and communities. This work includes expanding opportunities and building tools for financial prosperity and economically stability and helping to build economic ecosystems that support opportunities for all members of the community to thrive.
Empowering Defenders Initiative and Public Defense Clearinghouse
The Empowering Defenders Initiative hosts a Scholar and Practitioner for a three-day visit. Over the course of their visit, the Scholar and Practitioner engage in the intellectual life of the Law School and give a joint public lecture discussing their work and strategies for operationalizing the scholar's research in litigation. Following their visit, the Scholar and Practitioner collaborate to draft a model pleading addressing the issues surfaced during their talk. The pleadings and the recording of their talk, along with any other material they identify, are housed in an online database (the Public Defense Clearinghouse) for use by public defenders, scholars, and advocates.
Housing Equity Project
Our home—not only the physical residence, but also the community in which it’s located and the stability of that home—impacts our lives in numerous and interdependent ways. There is nothing that place does not touch. Our access to education and jobs, our physical safety and our health, our access to healthy food, our social networks, the quality of the air we breathe, are all deeply impacted by where we call home. The Housing Equity Project of the Community Equity Lab works to address how race, class, and place intersect to shape people’s lives. Our aim is to advance stability and empowerment in those communities most historically affected by exclusionary and predatory housing laws, policies, and practices.
Housing policy plays a central role in racial subjugation—creating and entrenching racial segregation, contributing to the racial wealth gap by cutting off access to home ownership, forcing people of color into undignified, and inhuman living conditions, driving educational inequality, and causing personal and community instability. In addition to challenging the barriers in access to traditionally white, segregated spaces and the opportunities available in those spaces, the Housing Equity Project explores how we support people of color to stay in their homes and in the communities they call home; how we support the long-term residents of communities of color who may face forces of exclusion following economic investment and gentrification; and how we develop traditionally marginalized communities in ways that benefit their residents.
Racial Equity Impact Studies Initiative
Racial equity impact studies analyze how racial groups will be affected by a proposed action, policy, or practice. Although they have been most frequently proposed and adopted in the context of reforming the criminal legal system, racial equity impact studies have the potential to unearth and explain racial inequities in many systems and can be a critical tool for communities seeking to prohibit or ameliorate harmful policies before they wreak havoc on communities of color.
CEL is engaged in research, advocacy, and community partnerships to explore the transformational potential of racial equity impact studies broadly, with a particular focus on infrastructure development projects. Racial equity impact studies would allow jurisdictions to understand, document and address the damage proposed development projects could have on impacted communities, as well as to systematically consider the range of interventions available to move forward equitably.
Reshaping Law’s Archives Project
This project confronts the erasure of race from legal pedagogy, legal scholarship, and the law's archive more broadly. Generations of scholars have uncovered the integral role that race has played in the development of legal doctrine. Nevertheless, there remains a perception that race is not relevant to certain areas of law. In part, this is due to a dearth of scholarship about race in certain doctrinal areas, as well as an overwhelming silence on issues of race in many legal educational materials. This project responds directly to this problem. By investigating cases and uncovering their full histories, this project's aims are twofold: 1) to create publicly accessible archives on questions of race and law to facilitate future research in this area and change the narrative, and 2) to generate a group of case materials for law school classrooms that can be used to foster conversations about the relationship between race and law.
Transportation Equity Initiative
Transportation has always been both a reflection and a driver of inequality. Our transportation systems shape who gets to feel like they belong, who enjoys access to the opportunities that this country offers, who gets to live with safety and dignity, and who gets locked out and left behind. Transportation infrastructure is the infrastructure of equitable education, good health, economic opportunity, and a vibrant democracy. The late United States Congressman John Lewis once wrote, “the legacy of Jim Crow transportation is still with us. Even today, some of our transportation policies and practices destroy stable neighborhoods, isolate and segregate our citizens in deteriorating neighborhoods, and fail to provide access to jobs and economic growth centers.” All aspects of our transportation system – including highways, roads, bridges, sidewalks, and public transit – continue to be planned, funded, and operated in ways that provide unequal access along race and class lines; limit access to jobs, health, and opportunity; and force marginalized communities to bear a disproportionate share of environmental harms.
The Community Equity Lab’s Transportation Equity Initiative is working to seize this time of significant infrastructure development in communities across the country as an opportunity to redress some of the harm caused by discriminatory transportation infrastructure, to strengthen impacted communities, and to advance community equity and distributive justice as we move forward.
Narrative Change Project
The stories we tell each other drive our understanding of what justice demands, and our commitment to meeting those demands. Impactful storytelling is as essential as systematic analysis in driving our political commitment to community equity, if not more so. The Community Equity Lab’s Narrative Change Project will promote a broader understanding of community equity by educating the public on the generations of harm created by oppressive economic, social, and government policies, while making the case for policy solutions that root out injustice and build a more inclusive, equitable nation.
Our strategies include traditional and experimental narrative efforts including essays, legislative testimony and reports, videos, oral history, and multimedia projects. We will also submit amicus briefs to ensure that state and federal courts understand the human and community impact of law and policies.
Community Equity Lab Collaborative
Advancing community equity requires community. CEL will bringing together scholars, researchers, and advocates across disciplines to work together towards community equity through convenings, scholarship and research workshops, and working groups.