Projects need to be both top down and bottom up. They need to include the community leaders who can make the changes as well as a broad coalition of people who will “advocate up” for the changes.  These projects all emphasized the need for organizational and community leaders to be visibly supportive and active in implementation as well as program design. 

Research forms the baseline for program design and helps to build a coalition that is ready to make change.  ERASE Racism conducted research on fair housing.  Sonoma County worked with Moody’s to study the impact of addressing educational disparities.  Seattle assessed how city services benefited and affected different racial groups.  Jacksonville has done numerous studies about racial disparities in the community.  

Projects must be designed to have some successes in the first couple of years.  Without this, people lose steam. 

Projects need to identify the issues that people want to work on and get those people behind big policy changes.  Everything cannot be tackled at once, even with the understanding that the issues are interlocking.   But, it is important to have more than one ball in the air.  There are areas where you can move and areas where you may be stymied and these cannot be clearly identified before you start the work. 

Once policy is changed, the implementation must be tracked.  This may be less interesting to citizens and funders, but it is the only way to be sure that the changes really happen. 

Institutional changes need to go deep and be thorough.  Seattle uses a racial equity lens to review all budget items.  Some program directors could not see the link between their work and issues of racial equity at first, but the link to the budget encouraged them to look deeper.  The Race and Social Justice Initiative provided criteria for best practices so that departments had a guide as they gained experience with the Budget and Policy Filter.  These criteria included expanding opportunity and access as well as promoting collaboration and civic engagement.  Linking racial equity and budgeting has made an enormous statement about how important race and social justice are to the city.