Introducing Advancing Equity

If you’ve been following the Meyer Foundation over the last few years, you probably know that we’ve been on a journey to gather input and greater context as we reframed the Foundation’s role in creating positive social change in the Greater Washington region. This journey began with the planning process ahead of our 2015 strategic plan, as Meyer staff and board engaged in listening tours, community conversations, an online community forum, and ultimately developed what became known as our Roadmap for Change. When we released the Roadmap and named racial inequity as a root cause of the challenges so many people in our region face, we committed to continually engaging deeper internally and externally to understand what it would mean to incorporate a racial equity lens to our work.

The input we received, and continue to receive, from community members, our grantee partners, and partners working in other sectors, has led to deep reflection for the Foundation, drives our agenda, and informs each step in the evolution of our work.

As you may recall, we issued revised grants guidelines and goals in January as we launched our first grant round of the year. Now, I’m pleased to share with you a restatement of our strategic plan called Advancing Equity. This plan is the result of merging our original Roadmap with our sharper focus on racial equity, and includes some revised language based on feedback we received since we rolled out the revised grant guidelines earlier this year.

We also encourage you to take a look at our new and developing racial equity resource page, where we’ve included links to information that has guided our thinking, definitions that will add clarity to the way we discuss our work and its urgency, and a glimpse of the local history that contributed to the state of racial equity in the region today. This is a living resource that will evolve as we continuously learn from the broader community and from the equity expertise of the recent additions to our staff, Terri D. Wright, and Aisha Alexander. We hope you will find our resource page informative and helpful, and we encourage you to check back for updates.

As always, we welcome your feedback and thank you for being on this journey with us.