The Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) has a new five-year strategic plan that, along with laying out how it will help organizations in Marion and Hamilton counties, was bluntly critical of its own role in issues such as systemic racism.
CICF’s plan is broken into five categories for Marion County: family stabilization, economic mobility, criminal justice reform, neighborhood empowerment and placemaking, and dismantling systemic racism. All are related and share similar themes, especially when it comes to dismantling systemic racism.
CICF’s plan says the foundation will develop “more inclusive and comprehensive hiring policies for staff and vendors,” as well as educate staff, board members and those in the community about systemic racism.
Pamela Ross, vice president of opportunity, equity and inclusion for CICF, said the foundation began implementing its new hiring policies about six months ago. She said it’s important for staff to realize systemic racism is “alive and well” and causing some communities to be “disinvested in and ignored.”
“It wasn’t an easy place to arrive to, but it was the right thing,” Ross said of giving an honest evaluation of CICF. “You can’t just keep skirting around that when you’re talking about poverty and people being marginalized and left behind.”
As part of its plan to dismantle systemic racism, CICF will commission a community-wide equity index and attitudinal study every five years, starting this fall. Ross said the equity index and attitudinal study will give CICF and other community leaders information about the problems facing communities and how people in those communities perceive different issues.
“We know that we are just now embarking into a place that will disrupt a lot of things in this community,” Ross said, especially as it relates to holding the organizations CICF funds accountable to the goal of dismantling systemic racism. “We believe it’s necessary, and as a community foundation that’s exactly what we should be doing.”
Closely related to systemic racism is economic mobility. A 2014 summary of statistics put together by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez showed Indianapolis ranked 46th out of the largest 50 U.S. cities in economic mobility, with those starting in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder having a 4.9% chance of reaching the top fifth. The best city was San Jose, California, at 12.9%.
That’s a low number for Indianapolis, regardless of race, but it becomes even more bleak when accounting for race. According to Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard University, in 99% of U.S. neighborhoods, Black boys earn less in adulthood than white boys who grew up in families with comparable incomes.
“That is something we consider to be crisis-level,” said Andrew Black, director of community leadership at CICF. “It’s something that we really felt like we needed to focus on.”
To do that, CICF is prioritizing education and career opportunities. Black said the foundation will do a better job going forward of seeking out nontraditional and minority students for scholarship opportunities, and it will do better at connecting those students with programs that can prepare them for the “21st-century economy” with career training that won’t be obsolete in a decade.
Black said CICF will also become more involved on the policy side, something the foundation hasn’t focused on in the past. He said the foundation’s leaders will take the next year to figure out how they can be effective in policy and then create an “internal game plan.”
In criminal justice reform, one CICF initiative involves creating a “safety index” to assess the realities of crime in neighborhoods and gauge the community’s perception of how bad crime is. Brian Payne, president and CEO of CICF, said the perception of how bad crime is can be worse than reality, especially when there is a “sensational” crime or an uptick in random crime.
Another one of CICF’s goals in criminal justice reform is to reduce the suspension and expulsion rates of students in Marion County schools. In Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, Black students represented 48.5% of enrollment but 71.3% of out-of-school suspensions and 72.8% of expulsions in the 2015-16 school year, according to data collected by the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education.
In its work with family stabilization, one of the areas CICF will focus on is transportation. According to the foundation, Indianapolis has the second highest transportation cost as a percent of income among the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the country. Payne said this can negatively affect people’s economic opportunities and health.
CICF’s grand vision to address this is a Personal Mobility Network, which Payne said would be a “personalized solution” to transportation. It could include the familiar transit options such as bus routes and bike-share systems, as well as ride-sharing services such as Lyft and Uber.
Payne said he understands CICF can’t accomplish everything in its strategic plan in just five years. It will take much longer to “dismantle” systemic racism, for example. But it’s the start of what Payne called a “generational commitment” to make Central Indiana “one of the most racially just and economically just cities in America.”
Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.
CICF ANNOUNCES STRATEGIC PLAN
CICF will unveil its five-year strategic plan to the public at its Inclusive City event.
• When: 4-6:30 p.m. April 11
• Where: Bankers Life Fieldhouse, 125 S. Pennsylvania St.
The Central Indiana Community Foundation announced a new five-year strategic plan that includes economic mobility and dismantling systemic racism. Pictured is an activity night in the Riverside neighborhood in December 2018. (Photo/Wildstyle Da Producer)
