Re-imagining a decolonized future: community transformation through innovative research, teaching, and engagement- toward an anti-racist community where everyone has equal access to educational, employment, and social opportunities, regardless of race, identity or background.
UCI's Center for Truth & Racial Healing serves as a hub for collaborative racial justice
and inclusion programs on campus and in the surrounding area. The center incubates
and supports existing anti-racism research and work; provides resources toward racial
justice; develops and supports a culture of racial healing and intergroup dialogue
across campus units, divisions and departments; and expands collaborative community
partnerships to support racial healing, equity and inclusion.
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Truth, Racial Healing & TransformationIn January 2020, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, in partnership with the W.K Kellogg Foundation and Newman’s Own named UCI as one of 13 new Truth, Racial Healing, & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers. The TRHT effort is aimed to help communities embrace racial healing and uproot conscious and unconscious beliefs in the hierarchy of human value. TRHT is a comprehensive, national process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change, and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism. By prioritizing inclusive, community-based healing activities and policy designs that seek to change collective community narratives and broaden the understanding that Americans have of their diverse experiences, the TRHT Framework is grounded in five pillars:
- Narrative Change: Creating new narratives that can influence perspectives, perceptions and behaviors about and towards one another so we can work more effectively and productively towards community-based change
- Racial Healing and Relationship Building: focusing on healing from the wounds of anti-Blackness, to build mutually respectful relationships across racial lines that honor and value each person’s humanity
- Separation: Examining and finding ways to address segregation, colonization and concentrated poverty in neighborhoods to ensure equitable access to health, education and jobs
- Law: Reviewing discriminatory civil and criminal laws and the public policies that come from them and recommending just solutions
- Economy: Studying structured inequality and barriers to economic opportunities and
recommending approaches that can create an equitable society
UCI’s Center for Truth & Racial Healing serves as a hub for collaborative racial justice and inclusion programs on campus and in the surrounding area. The center incubates and supports existing anti-racism research and work; provides resources toward racial justice; develops and supports a culture of racial healing and intergroup dialogue across campus units, divisions and departments; and expands collaborative community partnerships to support racial healing, equity and inclusion.
For more information
Kellogg Foundation's Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation
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Outreach Programs
Racial Healing
Racial healing is one of the key components of the UCI TRHT campus center. Racial healing focuses on relationship building to unearth deeply rooted beliefs and attitudes, heighten awareness of our common humanity. Increase number of people in authentic conversations, and engage the community in healing activities is supported through:- Respectful dialogue
- Recognition and affirmation of people and their experiences
- Connectedness to individual cultures, histories, and practices
- The sense of agency, nurtured through racial justice activism
The UCI Center for Truth & Racial Healing offers support for racial healing across units and departments and throughout the surrounding community. Additionally, the center offers training for racial healing facilitation. Please contact us to develop a plan to serve your organization’s needs.
Deconstructing Diversity Initiative
The Deconstructing Diversity Initiative (DDI) was founded in 2015 with seed money from the UC Irvine Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture & Inclusion to address concerns about the campus racial climate. DDI was inspired by the Olive Tree Initiative's experiential learning model. A cohort of students are chosen each year to take part in an intensive seminar series and then travel to sites of historical and contemporary importance to the formation and experience of race in America. By pairing classroom learning with travel experience across the States, DDI provides college students as well as community and campus participants the education, training and experiences that enable them to better understand, negotiate and resolve issues of race.
More information at: www.deconstructingdiversity.uci.edu
Diversity, Inclusion, & Racial Healing Ambassador Program
In response to the race-based violence of the 2017 Charlottesville protest, the Samueli Foundation and UCI sought to build a program for high school students that would unearth and jettison the deeply held, and often unconscious, beliefs created by racism - primarily a belief in the hierarchy of human value. By focusing on youth social justice leadership development, the School of Social Sciences meets its mission of transforming our academic and local community through the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Healing program (DIRHA). DIRHA strives to prepare high school youth to positively engage within diverse and pluralistic environments both within and beyond high schools, and to improve inclusivity within their communities.
More information at: www.dirha.uci.edu
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UCI Host TRHT Center Steering Committee
Adisa Ajamu
Semassa Boko
Long Bui
Maureen Dadabhoy
Teresa Neighbors
Jacque Nunez
Kristin Peterson
Jose Ruedas
Krystal Tribett
April Van Ligten
Julie Vue
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Resources
Racial Justice Education in OC
Anti-Racism Resources
Racial Justice Internships/Volunteer Opportunities in OC
Safely Reporting Racism or Discrimination
Racial Affinity Groups on Campus
Racial Justice Support in the community (orgs)
Partner Websites
For more information, contact:
