CSRD Case Statement

Justice + equality for all

What will it take to reach that goal, to live up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the founding documents of our American democracy?

Our shared hope for equality and justice will advance our nation, our institution and each other. How do we sustain the inquiry, innovation and dialogue that will enable us to reach the highest levels of an inclusive democracy?

How do we find a way forward? Where and how might we thrive as individuals, communities and a nation? What questions might we pose as we pursue civic engagement, engage in civil discourse and ensure transformative leadership?

The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy is a destination for people like you who are asking those hard and necessary questions, people who are determined and willing to grapple with pressing issues of race and democracy.

When you support the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, you are an architect of change. Your support for the Center’s unique and powerful programming will help to advance the systemic changes our country needs to live up to the promise of its founding documents.

President’s message “I have often said that the Constitution of the United States is perhaps the most important aspirational document ever written and codified by humans to govern themselves, particularly in the sense that it leaves little doubt about its goals of equality, justice, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Michael M. Crow, PhD

“I have also asked whether it is possible to find ways to meet the ideals of the Constitution and all it stands for. The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy is doing the important work that needs to be done to explore race and our American institutions and serve as a platform for us to live up to our founding ideals.”

President, Arizona State University

You help us to do more The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University has cultivated meaningful civic engagement around issues of race and democracy for more than a decade with the goal of creating a just and equitable society.

As the only Center at ASU and in Arizona that examines race and democracy in direct relation to each other, the Center is uniquely qualified to serve as a destination for people addressing the pressing societal issues surrounding both.

Through intentional and creative programming — including its acclaimed annual signature events, Delivering Democracy and Social Cohesion Dialogues — the Center has nurtured public discourse around issues such as equity in education, health and housing; race, gender and civic discourse; race, place and public memory; and the emerging technologies of democracy.

Director’s message “The mission of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy is deeply informed by our ASU Charter. We recognize the incredible opportunity and sobering responsibility to model purposeful inclusion and to demonstrate our leadership as a resource for ASU communities and the expanding national and global communities that are engaging with and inspired by our programs and initiatives.

Lois Brown, PhD

Foundation Professor, English Director, Center for the Study of Race and Democracy

“The Center defines success through the transformational leadership and substantive civic engagement we inspire and support, the arenas we create for informed thinking and the connections we sustain and deepen between diverse communities so that we may thrive because of and alongside each other.”

Our mission Through each of its programs, the Center holds fast to its mission to: • • • •

Build and sustain robust partnerships that inspire audiences.

Encourage and support visionary scholarship that deepens our understanding of contemporary and historic issues and possibilities.

Facilitate informed and transformative dialogues about race and democracy.

Honor ASU’s commitment to academic excellence and accessibility.

The Center pursues these goals through programming that is deliberate in its local, statewide, national and global outreach; fosters faculty, staff and student participation at and beyond ASU; and nurtures rigorous intellectual engagement that informs curricula across all four ASU campuses.

Yet, we continually aspire to do more.

The campaign to sustain the CSRD To build on its successful first decade, the Center has developed strategic goals and priorities designed to provide long-term, sustaining support for key initiatives, ensuring they grow in scope and impact.

Our programming — already recognized within and beyond the university as spirited, innovative and impactful — will reach wider audiences, and provide more opportunities to inform conversations about race and democracy.

Additionally, the campaign will enable the Center to expand and create new programs and initiatives, such as research grants for ASU faculty, staff and students; develop high-profile events in Washington, D.C.; and create residency programs that attract academicians, practitioners and distinguished visitors, especially those from historically marginalized communities.

We ask you — our supporters, community leaders and organizations, industry partners, alumni, parents and friends — to join us in this effort. Become an architect of change!

In the face of widening societal disparities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial that we continue to champion equality and foster positive change in our communities.

Working together, we can make the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy a national model for bringing communities together to address issues of race, democracy, equity and justice.

Naming of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy $3,000,000 Your gift will be an enduring commitment to transformative dialogue, engagement and initiatives around core national issues of race and democracy. A gift of this stature would ensure the Center’s stability and enable it to flourish as a distinctive ASU and Arizona entity known for, admired and cherished by diverse communities and partners. A gift would provide the opportunity to name the CSRD in perpetuity.

Delivering Democracy $500,000 Inaugurated in 2014, the annual Delivering Democracy program has become one of the most anticipated events at ASU and in the communities we serve. Delivering Democracy features visionary individuals who challenge the traditional boundaries of democratic ideals and address key challenges that emerge around issues of race and democracy. Delivering Democracy offers a safe and inclusive space that enables us to overcome polarization and division, and enhance our shared understanding of the roots and possibilities of democratic striving.

Your gift will enable the Center to sustain its acclaimed annual program and ensure that influential thought leaders continue to dialogue with individuals from all ASU campuses, the state of Arizona, the nation and the world.

Delivering Democracy 2020 was the first live-streamed broadcast format of this much anticipated signature event and, for the first time, the CSRD had immediate connection with global audiences. This leadership gift will enable far-reaching impact and calls for spirited civic engagement around the world.

$50,000 per year for up to 5 fellows

Teaching Faculty Fellows Program $100,000

This proposed fellowship program addresses the power of the arts to interrogate collective understandings and invocations of race, democracy, justice, memory, displacement and claim.

Fellows, drawn from all four ASU campuses and from the national and international arts community, will be eligible for a yearlong fellowship. Fellows will benefit from a CSRD affiliation and a multi-disciplinary, community-based and academically rooted environment from which to develop scholarship, and further their practice and professional advancement. Fellows will participate in a weekly CSRD Fellows seminar, work closely with the CSRD director, engage in Center programming as appropriate, and develop curricular and programming connections with affiliated faculty and community partners.

This CSRD fellows program is a unique ASU initiative designed to provide critical intellectual engagement for non-tenure-track teaching faculty at the university.

The fellows, drawn from all four ASU campuses, the majority of whom have demanding teaching loads as high as five courses per semester and who provide critical foundational courses to ASU undergraduates, will have the benefit of course release for one semester and will use this time to cultivate and intensify their teaching of race and democracy.

The program will enable illuminating cross-disciplinary engagement for the fellows and build their pedagogical confidence, and provide them with sustained time to write and develop scholarship that enhances their strengths as teachers and scholars. Each cohort will contribute to CSRD-based certificate offerings and to CSRD digital publications featuring essays on race and democracy.

Annual funding goals

Race, Arts and Democracy Fellows Program

Created Equal Film Series

Annual funding goals

$25,000

Race, Arts and Democracy Series $50,000

CSRD Community Fellows Program $50,000 annually for 10 Fellows

This series harnesses the power of film, creative arts and performance, enabling audiences to examine together the evolving meanings and interpretations of freedom and equality. Programming, often arranged in partnership with ASU Gammage and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, features groundbreaking artists, accomplished and emerging filmmakers, and public artists whose work invites engagement with issues of race, place, power and change. Funding of the Created Equal Film and Art Series will sustain and intensify the program and will enable more program offerings to underserved and rural areas of Arizona as well as increased engagement with Arizona schools.

The Race, Arts and Democracy Series underscores the vital connections between race, the arts and the work to sustain, imagine, understand and document democracy.

Funding of this program will provide stipends for acclaimed and emerging artists in and beyond the United States who will serve as Race, Arts and Democracy fellows.

Fellows will curate public programs and educational workshops that illuminate the complexities of race and the possibilities of democracy. This innovative CSRD program series explores the power of creativity and how the arts enable us to see and learn together about justice, accessibility and equity, civil rights, economic inequality and the multifaceted work to achieve social justice in our world today

This program will demonstrate the power of universal learning by creating cohorts that bring scholars, practitioners, community-based leaders and innovators, lawyers, artists and K–12 educators and their broad diversity of expertise and creativity to bear on themes of state, national and global significance. During a yearlong tenure, each fellow will develop a module for CSRD-based online courses and certificate programs. An annual publication featuring fellows’ work and research will be hosted online.

Social Cohesion Dialogue $75,000

Words on Wheels addresses the fundamental need for productive and engaged citizens to develop writing skills.

$25,000

This mobile writing center enables participants from diverse Arizona communities to participate in workshops that focus on personal, professional and civic writing skills.

Funding for Words on Wheels will enable workshops in rural areas of Arizona and facilitate partnerships with communities that have been disenfranchised due to race, culture, poverty, individual trauma and other social injustices. Funding will support workshop materials, stipends for presenters, stipends for workshop mentors and access to technology for under-resourced communities and participants.

Impact Arizona Series

This series provides solutions-oriented workshops, dynamic lectures and necessary dialogues as part of a holistic effort to address pressing issues that affect Arizona in particular. Impact Arizona programming addresses critical issues in public health, race and racism, environmental challenges, law and public policy, housing, civil rights and educational equity. Your gift to Impact Arizona will sustain the program and enable expansion to rural areas of Arizona, and engagement with tribal nations and Arizona schools.

$25,000

Annual funding goals

Words on Wheels

Audiences participate in book discussion groups in advance of the major public dialogue, and address issues of race, class, environmental justice, civil rights, economic inequality and social justice. Your gifts to this program will ensure gifted and insightful authors are featured in the series. You will also enable the center to provide free copies of authors’ works to all who participate, ensuring successful and inclusive book discussions; create CSRD Social Cohesion Dialogue programming in Arizona middle schools and high schools; and provide unique speaker-engagement opportunities.

Summer Teacher Institutes $50,000 per year

These annual one- and two-week teacher institutes with face-to-face and online learning options will provide vital resources and opportunities for K–12 teachers in Arizona to broaden and deepen their understanding and teaching of race and democracy.

The institutes will have two initial sites: in Phoenix at the George Washington Carver Cultural Center — which operated for nearly three decades as Arizona’s first and only legally segregated high school — and ASU’s Barrett & O’Connor Center in Washington, D.C.

Annual funding goals

Each CSRD Summer Teacher Institute will result in contributions to a CSRD opensource public history database, which will be the first in the state to document Arizona’s history and engagement with civil rights, democracy and social justice movements.

The summer of 2020 catalyzed many across our nation and around the world to think deeply about productive action, meaningful collaboration and purposeful solidarity.

ASU and President Crow launched a bold 25-point plan — known as the Listen, Invest, Facilitate, Teach Initiative — to catalyze university-wide inquiry and action to address systemic inequities and to create opportunities for robust inclusion of faculty, students and staff of color. The CSRD plays a central role in the LIFT Initiative and in the university’s work more broadly to ensure the excellence, potential and success of all students, faculty and staff.

A bright light of hope In 1987, Arizona burst into national headlines but not for positive reasons.

Its governor, Evan Mecham, had rescinded the state’s holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Many in Arizona who wanted to honor King’s commitment to civil rights and support equal opportunity were hurt and angry.

To Carole Coles Henry, then the Deputy Equal Opportunity Director for the City of Phoenix, the ensuing public turmoil only fueled her commitment to human and civil rights in Arizona.

“I became even more energized and hopeful about the important work that needed to be done,” she remembers.

Carole Coles Henry CSRD Advisory Board Chair

It took years of local marches, protests and corporate engagement before Arizona citizens voted to enact a holiday honoring King in 1992.

Over the next 15 years, Coles Henry worked tirelessly with a team of dedicated staff and volunteers to strengthen the city’s human and civil rights program.

“As an agent of change, I had to be strategic and knowledgeable about history and trends,” she says. “I had to align myself with visionaries with reputations for successfully impacting matters related to race and democracy.” Coles Henry ultimately served in executive and management capacities for 27 years, working to advance equal opportunity agendas. Today, she serves as CSRD advisory board chair.

“The work is yet to be done in regard to human and civil rights for all people,” she says. “Our CSRD is a bright light of hope for ASU students, young people, families, corporations and the community.”

Cultivate our humanity Julia Patrick grew up in a well-to-do Phoenix neighborhood.

“To borrow from the sport of baseball, I was born on second base,” says Patrick, CEO of American Nonprofit Academy and a longtime publishing professional in the Valley. “From birth, I had the finest healthcare, education, housing and sustenance the burgeoning city of Phoenix could muster.”

Julia Patrick CSRD Advisory Board member

As she grew older, she realized others did not have her advantages. “Thanks to a well-preserved used car and a newfound driver’s license, I freely explored my city.

There were parts of communities that looked differently from our well-to-do white neighborhood.

“Urban blight was evident in parts of the city that were uncared for not by the residents, but our municipality. From well-worn school buildings to crumbling sidewalks, it seemed impossible that we could be living in the same city. Where were the freshly swept streets, beautifully planted streetscapes and public art? Clearly, these parts of my daily life did not exist for everyone across our community.”

Patrick has spent her adult life advocating for a stronger, level playing field. She currently sits on the CSRD advisory board.

“I am embracing the opportunity to hear new voices, different ideas and the rich experiences that cultivate our humanity,” she says. “The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy brings hope and explores the possibilities of betterment in my own community. The organization leads me to think differently, shed prejudices and embrace enlightened attitudes that ultimately make us all stronger and healthier.”

Foster a community ethos In 2014, leaders in the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy envisioned creating a community writing center.

This would be a place where people could hone their literacy skills. Writing coaches would teach people to draft and revise everything from job applications, family histories, creative nonfiction, poetry, civic documents and more.

James Wermers CSRD Faculty Fellow

“Writing, and sharing what we have written, are essential to democracy,” says James Wermers, a clinical assistant professor of humanities at ASU and a CSRD faculty fellow. We need to see our individual stories as part of a larger narrative, he says. We need to develop personal, professional and civic writing skills.

It was particularly important the center serve those who historically have been disenfranchised due to race, culture, poverty, individual trauma and social injustice.

There was one hurdle.

Phoenix is a vast, sprawling, culturally diverse metropolis. Place the center in one location, and they would have shut out many communities they hoped to serve.

So, the CSRD pioneered a new model — a mobile community writing center.

Since its inception, Words on Wheels has served hundreds throughout the Phoenix metro area.

“All of our workshops foster a community ethos — the belief that each of us has something of value to share with others and something of value to learn from others,” says Wermers, who leads the project.

Change starts locally While serving as a student intern at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, Alexis Thompson shined a spotlight on the complicated topic of evictions.

In 2019, Thompson helped organize the center’s first public event focusing on evictions.

“Eviction: Politics, Policy, and Possibilities” brought together more than 100 stakeholders — legal professionals, journalists, legislators and representatives from the Arizona Department of Housing — to discuss the causes and impacts of evictions, and measures to reduce them in the state

Alexis Thompson ’20 CSRD intern, spring 2019

“I am thankful for the way my work there connected me with our community,” says Thompson, who graduated in 2020 summa cum laude with a communication degree.

“Attempting to address an issue as large and impactful as eviction is difficult, but I learned that change starts locally.”

We invite you to learn more about ASU Center for the Study of Race and Democracy visit our website. csrd.asu.edu