HOW TO BUILD RACIAL EQUITY IN CHARLESTON
Proactively understanding and addressing racism in our community

Please join our next Ideas Into Action with LaVanda Brown, executive director of YWCA Greater Charleston.

Last year, YWCA Greater Charleston and a consortium of nonprofit partners brought the first-ever Racial Equity Institute (REI) series to the Charleston area. During multiple sessions in 2017 and 2018, facilitators from REI—nationally recognized for helping communities address institutional racism—have led local community leaders and laypeople through two phases of training, helping them better understand and address racism in their own communities, organizations, and personal lives.

They learned things like a new, stronger vocabulary to use when discussing issues of race and ethnicity, a new way to reframe problems and come up with solutions, a new way of thinking based on analyzing before taking action, and the courage to take risks to change entrenched practices. After the sessions, some gathered in sub-groups of participants with similar cultural and ethnic backgrounds to further talk about issues they were experiencing as someone with that background, enabling them to learn further from each other.

These sessions and groups are still happening now, and LaVanda will tell us more about this ground-breaking program, how it’s changing Charleston, and how much potential it has to change our region in even more powerful ways.

YWCA GREATER CHARLESTON:

For 111 years, YWCA Greater Charleston has worked to eliminate racism and empower women in Charleston, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties. A historic local association of YWCA USA, one of the oldest and largest multicultural women’s organizations in the United States, it seeks to create opportunities for personal growth, leadership, and economic development of women and people of color. Its annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration is one of Charleston’s longest running events, predating Spoleto Festival USA and other well-known local events, and was one of the first MLK tributes in the nation; today it is the largest tribute to Dr. King in South Carolina, attracting 30,000 celebrants each year. This year, YWCA Greater Charleston also introduced #WhatWomenBring to celebrate and empower South Carolina’s women in business, the first event of its kind in the Charleston region.