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| 2001 Annual Report | |
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PRRAC:THE ELEVENH YEARNote: Please contact us if you would like a print copy or a copy of the audited financial statements. BACKGROUNDThe Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) is a national nonprofit organization founded by major civil rights, civil liberties and anti-poverty groups to address problems at the intersections of race and poverty. It effectively began operation in 1990. The impetus to establish PRRAC was the need for advocates and social science researchers to work together more closely in order to combat the continuing twin scourges of poverty and racism in the United States. The overlapping crises of housing/homelessness, poor educational performance, persistent unemployment and underemployment, declines in real wages and income supports, rising infant mortality and drug-related crime in poor communities have prompted national as well as local civil rights and civil liberties groups to reassess their own priorities. Traditional anti-poverty and legal services advocates have likewise begun to search for new allies, to update their priorities and to fashion new organizing strategies and legal theories that might meet the increasingly complex problems confronting the poor and racial minorities. Most advocates have concluded that, to be effective, they must, more than ever before, pursue joint or cooperative strategies. Equally important, they have recognized that they must develop a deeper understanding of labor market economics, social psychology and rapid demographic changes in minority and poverty communities. Advocates need an infusion of the best information and social theory from social scientists. They also need a means to direct the research energies of social scientists towards questions of importance to their own clients. PRRAC has two objectives. The first is to function as a forum for community-based
activists, policy advocates, civil rights and anti-poverty attorneys, and science
researchers who are working on behalf of the poor and racial minorities. The
second is to commission, fund and disseminate social science research that can
advance community-based activism, policy initiatives and litigation on behalf
of these same persons. Through a range of networking functions and research
funding, PRRAC hopes to fashion, publicize and replicate new strategies to address
the problem of persistent poverty and racism in the United States. NETWORKING/PUBLICATIONS/CONFERENCESPRRAC continued to publish its bimonthly newsletter journal Poverty & Race (Vol. 10, Nos. 1-6), and published its second "best of P&R" volume (Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America, ed. Chester Hartman, Foreword by Congressman John Lewis, published by M.E. Sharpe), containing the leading articles and symposia from 1997-2000. Following up on PRRAC's October 1999 all-day Institute at Howard University, "Putting the ‘Movement' Back Into Civil Rights Teaching," co-sponsored with the Network of Educators on the Americas (NECA) and attended by some 300 K-12 educators from the DC area, a joint project (with NECA, recently renamed Teaching for Change) is under way to produce a similarly titled curriculum for nationwide use, complemented by teacher workshops. Speakers and resource people who participated in the Institute, as well as many others, are contributing materials, and several Institute presenters are serving on the Project Advisory Committee. Among those involved were/are: Bob Moses, Sonia Sanchez, Howard Zinn, Elsa Barkley Brown, Suzan Shown Harjo, Lynda Tredway, Martha Honey, Ezequiel Pajibo, Arnoldo Ramos, Luci Murphy, Gabriel Torre, Lea Ybarra, Elise Bryant, James Forman, Taylor Branch, Manijeh Gonzalez Fata, Maya Cameron, Charles Cobb, Don Freeman, Anne Gallivan & Sondra Hassan Following up PRRAC's June 2000 by-invitation working conference ("High Student Mobility/ Classroom Turnover: How to Address It? How to Reduce It?") at Howard University Law School, a special issue of The Journal of Negro Education, co-edited by PRRAC Executive Director Chester Hartman and Prof. Todd Franke of UCLA, will be produced. Contributors will include most of the conference presenters (Russell Rumberger- Univ. of California-Santa Barbara, David Kerbow-Center for School Improvement, Univ. of Chicago, Elizabeth Hinz- Minneapolis Public Schools, JoAnn Isken-Moffitt Elementary School, Los Angeles, Roger Rosenthal-Migrant Legal Action Group, Angela Branz-Spall- National Association of State Divisions of Migrant Education, and others). A handbook is also planned to provide strategies for reducing mobility and addressing students' and families' needs created by such mobility. GRANTMAKINGNo new research/advocacy grants were made in 2001,due to lack of funds available for this regranting function. However. work continued on many of PRRAC's previously funded projects, as well as on the larger project the PRRAC Board has commissioned: "Housing and School Segregation: Government Culpability, Government Remedies." Among the projects completed in 2001 (and reported in 2001 issues of Poverty & Race) were: + "A Closer Look: A Parent's Guide to Standardized Testing in North Carolina," from the Common Sense Foundation in Raleigh; + "The Return to Separate and Unequal: Metropolitan Milwaukee Schools
Funding Through a Racial Lens," + "Half the Solution: The Supports DC Students Need to Meet High Academic Standards," from DC VOICE. + The Racial Justice Report Card (from the Applied Research Center), carried
out by organizations in Bell County, KY; Guilford County, NC; and Copies of these reports (as well as those of other PRRAC grantees) are available upon request, and all are posted on PRRAC's website. An updated descriptive listing of the ca. 100 projects PRRAC has funded to date and the products thereof is available from us upon request. It is also posted on PRRAC's website: www.prrac.org. We are seeking funding for further grantmaking, in specific areas and more generally --possibly via an endowment for this element of PRRAC's work. Looking cumulatively at PRRAC's small grants program, the most common substantive area of work is housing (and homelessness); other areas include health, education, employment, criminal justice, immigration, transportation, voting, domestic violence and the environment. Researchers funded included staff of advocacy organizations, academics (working independently on projects that will be of assistance to advocacy groups or in tandem with such groups) and members of grassroots organizations. Where organizations do not have access to appropriate research help, PRRAC draws on its network of researchers to locate such assistance. In deciding which applications to fund, criteria -- beyond the basic threshold requirements that the request be for research support around the intersection of race and poverty, and that the research directly support a planned, concrete advocacy agenda -- include the importance of the advocacy effort, the utility and quality of the proposed research, the potential for success of both the research effort and advocacy work, the project's potential for publicity and dissemination, and its potential for replication elsewhere. PRRAC strongly encourages involvement of minority researchers. As projects are completed, opportunities for replicating the research and/or advocacy will be explored and, as appropriate and needed, advanced. While the advocacy work advanced by PRRAC-supported research usually takes a while to implement, there are many successes to date. Some examples: · The Clinica Legal Latina/Ayuda's research on domestic violence among DC-area immigrants helped in passage of federal legislation protecting the immigration status of women victimized by such abuse. · The ACLU's research led to their successful suit challenging Alabama's racially discriminatory education system. · The Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago's research documenting the miseducation of homeless children helped pass state legislation guaranteeing such pupils an adequate education, and produced a litigation settlement with a similar result. · Ed Kissam's research on the systematic undercount of farmworkers led to revision of Census Bureau enumeration procedures, in turn increasing population-based program funds. · Yale Rabin and Joe Darden's documentation of the government role in creating racially segregated housing patterns in Allegheny County, PA, was a key element in producing an extraordinarily progressive consent decree in the Lawyers' Committee For Civil Rights Under Law suit. · The Labor/Community Strategy Center's research into racially discriminatory transit planning and implementation by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been used to support their path-breaking, successful lawsuit; the suit raised a new area for Title VI and Constitutional concerns and enforcement, already being replicated and considered in other cities. · Research by Yale Rabin critical of the public housing replacement plans in New Haven and Providence and his preparation of alternative plans have assisted Legal Services lawyers in both cities to secure improved plans for desegregated housing. PRRAC administers the Edith Witt Internships – a fund established by family and friends in memory of a former staff member of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. The purpose of the Internship is to "help develop a new generation of community activists," and each year a grant is awarded to a grassroots community group working on social justice issues. The first award went to the Women of Color Resource Center in Berkeley, California, and their intern, Jackie Henderson. This year's award went to the Tellin' Stories Project in DC and their intern, Sandra Cruz. 2001 PRRAC BOARD OF DIRECTORSCHAIRJohn Charles Boger University of North Carolina School of Law Chapel Hill, NC VICE-CHAIRS José Padilla SECRETARY TREASURER
Sheila Crowley Chester Hartman Thomas Henderson Judith Johnson Elizabeth Julian S.M. Miller Don Nakanishi Florence Wagman Roisman Anthony Sarmiento Theodore M. Shaw Cathi Tactaquin William L. Taylor [Organizations listed for identification purposes only] 2001 PRRAC STAFFChester Hartman Sandra Paik [until 6/01] Denise Rivera Portis Melissa Best [until 8/01] Tracy Jackson [from 8/01] SOCIAL SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARDRichard Berk, UCLA Department of Sociology Frank Bonilla, Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies Cynthia Duncan, University of New Hampshire Department of Sociology Heidi Hartmann, Institute for Women's Policy Research (Washington, DC) William Kornblum, CUNY Center for Social Research Harriette McAdoo, Michigan State University School of Human Ecology Fernando Mendoza, Stanford University Center for Chicano Research Paul Ong, UCLA Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Planning Gary Orfield, Harvard University Graduate School of Education Gary Sandefur, University of Wisconsin Institute for Poverty Research Margaret Weir, University of California-Berkeley, Departments of Sociology & Political Science |
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