Have our Racial Equity Impact Assessment conclusions been keeping you up at night? Have you ever wondered how we arrived at a specific score, or wish we said more... (or less)? Do you think our assessments have amplified the experiences of the District’s Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color? Well we—the Council Office of Racial Equity (CORE)—spent the entire summer (annnd some of the fall 🙁) rethinking how to make our Racial Equity Impact Assessment work better for you, the Council, and the District.

In the spirit of transparency and solidarity, we invite you to hear about our process. Before we dive in, a few quick refreshers:

First, CORE launched in January 2021. Our mission is to eliminate racial inequities and achieve racial equity in the District of Columbia. Our primary task is to figure out whether Council’s policy and legislative proposals will make progress toward racial equity—or increase racial inequity. We conduct Racial Equity Impact Assessments (REIAs) to accomplish this task.

Second, a REIA is a careful and organized examination of how a proposed bill or resolution will affect different racial and ethnic groups. Before Council’s summer recess, our team completed ten REIAs using the five point scale below. REIA conclusions always started with the bill number, continued with a statement about the bill’s racial equity impact, and ended with “in the District of Columbia.”

For example, a conclusion read like, “Bill XX-XXX has the potential to advance racial equity in the District of Columbia.”

Over the past eleven months, we learned from the community, Council staff, and other government officials from across the country also bringing a racial equity lens to policy. We’ve reflected on how we have been successful and what we have learned from our experiences.  

Given the importance of racial equity, we could not sit on these learnings. We knew we had to use these learnings to improve our work. With this in mind, we decided to update our original scale.

Our updated scale is rooted in the Groundwater Approach, a metaphor introduced to our team during a workshop led by the Racial Equity Institute. This metaphor emphasizes that society’s systems were created to disadvantage or completely exclude Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. This means that racial inequity is caused by systems, regardless of culture or people’s individual behavior—and that the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are vastly different from the experiences of white people interacting with the same systems.

The Groundwater Approach aligns with our work. Writing a REIA requires exploring Council’s proposed solution in the context of the systems reinforcing racial inequity for Black, Indigenous, and other residents of color in the District. At the end of our research, we identify how a bill impacts the symptoms and structures of racial inequity.

To acknowledge these two types of impact, we are adding two additional “angles” to the racial equity lens moving forward. Our new approach will highlight whether a bill addresses the symptoms of racial inequity, the deeper structures that reinforce racial inequity, or both.

 A visual summary of the two new angles follows:

 As a new office, we are always looking to improve and refine the tools, processes, and practices. And more importantly, our office is joining committed residents who have been doing this work long before us. Please use the form below to tell us what you think about the new scales. What makes sense to you? What is confusing? What did we miss?

In the meantime, we encourage you to read more about how our new scales fit into our REIA process and review our completed REIAs.