Expanding Economic Opportunity Project

The Expanding Economic Opportunity Project is committed to opening avenues of opportunity and challenging discrimination and inequality, so that everyone has a chance to contribute and thrive in American society. Because the economy works best when it works for everyone, opportunity has never been a zero-sum game.  This project focuses on preserving and strengthening civil rights protections in law and policies that have the potential to benefit everyone and dismantle discriminatory barriers.  We pursue advocacy, advise leaders, advance policies, build tools, and convene thinkers to advance equal opportunity and help connect people from all communities to the levers of opportunity, including people from communities of color and others historically sidelined in our economy. 

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 Initiative 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 Project

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.

Community Equity Initiative 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.

Transportation Equity Project

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 Initiative’s Transportation Equity Project 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 Initiative'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.