About
Public policy has wide implications that affect individuals and communities. However, traditional policymaking typically involves policy development in distinct administrative siloes that fail to include the people who will be most impacted by the policies. Empowering communities to own and have decision-making powers over policies that directly impact them creates a better understanding of their challenges, opportunities, and options, thereby helping to improve equity.
Race Forward’s Policy Innovation Lab aims to disrupt traditional policy development and to position local communities as owners and decision-makers over policies that directly affect their daily lives. Through the Lab, Race Forward supports community-led policy development by providing tools and capacity-building training, and creating space for local organizations to share strategies to advance community-based initiatives.
The Lab is a way to re-imagine and create racially-equitable policy solutions.
Addressing complex and intersecting issues, the Lab’s current four people of color-led grassroots organizations are working to move community-led policy development to advance racial and climate justice.
Our Lab Partners
Food For the Spirit
Based in Buffalo, NY, uses the arts and creative facilitation to support racial healing, ecological justice, and equitable food systems. They are the conveners of the Buffalo Food Equity Network, a network of over 200 people of color working to support a movement for Western New York’s (WNY) new food economy and initiatives that fight the conventional food system which currently underserves communities of color. Food for the Spirit also builds relationships with farmers and gardeners of color, both rural and urban, local and statewide. Together, Food for the Spirit and the Buffalo Food Equity Network participate in the Policy Innovation Lab to build out a policy platform to advocate collectively around a more just and equitable food system that serves communities in Buffalo, WNY, and beyond.
