The Race Equity Project rebuild debuts
This last weekend we rolled out the second LSNC subsite rebuild: The Race Equity Project. The redesign elements will look familiar to those who have followed the LSNC rebuild series here that provides the core code base for the custom variations we eventually will deploy at all the LSNC.net domain sites.
The Race Equity Project rebuild directly reflects several touches first built out and tested here, namely, better use of the Google custom search API; more practical findability of archive posts by providing a browsing metaphor for visually scanning a list of posts in inverse chronological order; handy-dandy sharing improvements with use of the WordPress ShareDaddy plugin to add Twitter, Facebook, Email and Print doodads below each post and most pages; and, of course, our roll out of WPtouch Pro to provide visitors with a clean, intuitive mobile version of the site.
Widely recognized and respected for its leadership role within the national legal services community on race equity issues affecting low-income communities, the Race Equity Project has honored and supported its mission with 320+ posts since November 2006. This is the REP statement of it’s origin and purpose:
In 2003, through an empirically-based self-assessment, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) found marked racial disparities in the allocation of resources in our service area. Through further investigation and staff education, LSNC gained program-wide awareness that although the form of race discrimination has changed over past decades from predominantly overt and intentional to the implicit and institutional, discrimination continues to burden grossly LSNC’s clients and communities of color. This led LSNC to establish the Race Equity Project (REP) in 2004. The Race Equity Project seeks to address issues of race within our service area by (1) identifying race disparities in the institutions and systems used by LSNC’s clients; (2) educating clients and community agencies and organizations about these disparities and how to address them; and (3) enforcing laws and policies to eliminate or mitigate these disparities.
The REP is not a specialty unit within LSNC, but rather a program-wide broad approach to legal aid advocacy guided by the REP coordinators. LSNC implements the REP by using the following tools: (1) understanding social cognition and understanding and adopting strategies to counteract implicit bias and structural/institutional racism; (2) communications framing; (3) mapping and data presentation; and (4) community lawyering.
It will likely be sometime in May before we get the top-level LSNC Advocate feed done, but it’s coming.