The idea to form the Alliance Racial Equity Team as a place to hold in-depth discussions on racial equity and the Alliance and make recommendations to the Strategy Team emerged from the 2020 retreat.
Since then they:
Created a new Alliance purpose statement that explicitly calls out racial equity goals, subsequently approved by the Strategy Team and by Alliance participants.
Purpose:
Increase local investment in community health and human services by cities across King County, as well as by King County in unincorporated areas, ensuring that these investments include funding for BIPOC-led organizations, as well as programs that specifically support communities and individuals of color so as to increase the racial equity of our public funding systems.
Held a work session and invited Alliance participants to use SHSC’s (Identifying Institutional Racism) IDIR folio of tools to learn how it works AND to assess the Alliance and recommend areas of exploration to the Strategy Team to improve the Alliance’s capacity to work towards racial equity.
Forwarded those areas of exploration in the form of questions to the Strategy Team and they used them as the basis for their 4-hr long annual retreat in December 2021. They invited Racial Equity Team members, who participated.
In October 2021, the Team recommended the Alliance to pursue Funding Equity at King County. It has been conceived and begun in partnership with DCHS, with ongoing conversations in partnership to address concerns about anti-racism funding, stabilizing funding to BIPOC-led and focused organizations, and wage equity for all human services workers. This led to the Alliance joining Raising Wages for Changing Lives.
Brought forward the idea to the Strategy Team of creating a virtual “library” with a link on our website for racial equity tools and resources. The idea was accepted and Racial Equity Team has been implemented in 2022. Check out the Racial Equity Library!
Implemented a Racial Equity Focus segment at the monthly General Meetings in which participants share 2-5 mins of an undertaking, resource, wins, losses, and contentions they have had or are in at their organization in relation to racial equity. If you would be interested in a Racial Equity Focus spot, let us know at kcahs@kingcountyalliance.com