CONVENINGS

Crime and Punishment: On June 30, 2011, the Open Society Foundations (OSF) hosted the launch of Race, Crime and Punishment: Breaking the Connection in America, a publication by the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change presenting the insights from their two-year collaboration with the OSF around "Rethinking Crime and Punishment in America for the 21st Century."  The edited volume features essays by noted scholars and justice reform practitioners Michelle Alexander, Eric Cadora, Blake Emerson, Marc Mauer, Alan Mobley, Ian Haney Lopez, Alice O’Connor, Jonathan Simon, and Phil Thompson.   Keith O. Lawrence, who managed the project and edited the volume, moderated a distinguished panel at the launch event that included Alice O’Connor, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara; Clinton Lacey, Assistant Commissioner, NYC Department of Probation; Susan Tucker, Director, Justice Reinvestment, NYC Department of Probation, and Blake Emerson, former Roundtable staffer and current Yale Law School graduate student.

Moving from Thought to Action: The Roundtable’s Racial Equity and Society Seminars have proven to be effective levers for change. Over the past 8 years, 475 leaders from a variety of sectors have participated in the Roundtable’s Seminars, and they return to their home communities and organizations ready to undertake substantive efforts to promote racial equity.

As such, we wanted to gain a better understanding of the processes that spark this change and to build knowledge that could further strengthen the Roundtable’s racial equity leadership development activities.  With support from the Fetzer Institute, the Roundtable conducted a literature review drawing on the fields of neuroscience, social and cognitive psychology, social movement theory, and religion. In December of 2009, we convened an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners from those same fields in order to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. A publication is forthcoming.

Leadership Seminar on Racial Equity and Health: The Roundtable piloted a Leadership Seminar on Racial Equity and Health for 40 policy makers and practitioners in the Sacramento region in October of 2011.  Sponsored by the Sierra Health Foundation, the seminar brought together health care providers and leaders from a broad array of sectors.   Facilitated by Roundtable staff along with health expert Brian Smedley and communications specialist Lori Dorfman, the seminar applied a structural racism analysis to explain the persistence of racial disparities in health outcomes.  Sessions explored how the legacy of history, contemporary policies and practice, and cultural representations combine to create and perpetuate racial disparities in health.