In recent years, an emerging priority in social justice advocacy is to center advancing racial equity in one’s work, whatever the particular policy issue at hand may be. Given our nation’s long history of racism in all aspects of our society, we couldn’t agree more.

For over a year now, we’ve been working to advance this important goal as part of an ad-hoc coalition led by our colleagues at the Children’s Defense Fund of New York. Its joint effort is focused on the New York State Legislature. This group is promoting the general idea that all legislative and administrative initiatives addressing health, child well-being, and family economic mobility should be evaluated before adoption to assess its impacts with regard to improving racial equity.

Organizations who support this idea can sign-on to a letter to addressed to state legislators that calls on them to craft and pass legislation to require that all executive agency rules and regulations and all legislative bills include a “racial impact statement”.  Here’s where you can read the sign-on letter, and here is how an organization can endorse the letter.