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On May 8, 2024, we will be having our next All-Member sharing call. We are excited that Dr. Samuel H. Leguizamon Grant from Rainbow Research will be our guest speaker. Dr. Grant will speak to us on effective ways to tell our stories of DEI initiatives, outreach and programming using data.
Dr. Grant is the Executive Director at Rainbow Research, a national social-justice focused research, evaluation, and capacity-building non-profit organization. He has been doing work at the intersections of cultural, economic, environmental, gender, and racial justice since the early 1980s. As a life-long transformative organizer and social innovator, Dr. Grant utilizes critical participatory action research with communities striving for thriving. He has also had a private consulting practice since 1985 through which he has done what was called anti-racism work back then and is now more commonly known as DEIJ work.
At Rainbow Research, he and his team use data and democratic dialogue to surface what is invisible or under-acknowledged by leaders in systems, and use an intercultural, trans-paradigmatic process of action dialogue to generate mindset, behavior, relationship, systems, and policy shifts iteratively. By this process, the intention is to secure increasing returns to justice and common thriving over time.
When he noticed that poor Black and Brown people were structurally excluded from access to fair credit he organized a community development credit union. When he noticed that people from oppressed communities were not organized to lead the next economy, while suffering extreme structural racism in the current one, he organized a community-based environmental business incubator. When he noticed that the city he was living in was failing to effectively engage communities negatively impacted by their approach to community engagement, he brought the city and community together with an effective process that supported a community-driven approach to economic development.
Rainbow Research is currently facilitating initiatives in the domains of restorative economics, targeted universalism, human trafficking intervention, community engagement, arts education, creative placemaking and place-keeping, mental health for farmers and farmworkers, climate justice and community resilience, homelessness intervention and prevention, victims advocacy leadership development, environmental justice, and intercultural trans-paradigmatic work around the future of natural resources stewardship.
Dr. Grant, finally, is the son of two global-level civil rights leaders (Alice and Sam), who inspired him to follow in their footsteps. Like his mother, he is an award-winning educator. Like his father, he is relentless in his loving pursuit of justice, opportunity, and well-being for all.
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