Get Out and Vote!
The Haas Institute has collaborated with several partner organizations in California to produce a powerful Get out the Vote video to inspire voting, with the focus on next week's critical midterm elections. The public service announcement (PSA) is aimed at groups of voters that are often underrepresented at the polls and in outreach, such as youth and the Black community. This work is part of our Blueprint for Belonging project in California. An additional effort that is part of our national effort in civic engagement is the new “Level Up” campaign. Designed to motivate young people, especially those of color, to act civically and vote regularly, the campaign consists of videos that are aimed at five states: Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Illinois and Texas. This video is part of the initiative of the Haas Institute's National Civic Engagement Narrative Change Project that also includes several national organizations, including Faith in Action, More in Common, Beyond the Choir, and others.
The election is less than one week away—VOTE!!
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Mapping racial segregation in the Bay Area
This week the Haas Institute released new research that provides one of the most detailed views of residential racial segregation in the SF Bay Area. In the first of a series of reports to be released, the research presents a series of detailed maps illustrating segregation across the region, in each of the Bay Area's nine counties. The first report highlights and discusses the region's varying levels of segregation and shows which neighborhoods are the most segregated.
While the region as a whole appears to be diverse, the maps show that very few cities and neighborhoods reflect that level of diversity. As our assistant director Stephen Menendian wrote in a new blog post about this work, "Racial diversity and racial segregation are related concepts, but not the same thing. You can have a racially diverse community that is nonetheless very segregated. In fact, that is exactly the case in many Bay Area communities."
The goal of the research is to offer a clear portrait of the reality and extent of racial segregation in the Bay Area in order to push for policies and work that will help ameliorate and reverse it. Racial segregation has long been demonstrated to be a root cause of inequality more broadly.
View the web report here, read our press release here, and check out Stephen's blog post here.
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New Panel Video
Family Separations: From Herstories of Violence to Building Belonging
Last Friday we co-organized a panel discussion along with the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine on the issues of immigration and family separations. The panel included Angie Junck, a Supervising Attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; Ericka Huggins, a human rights activist, poet, educator and former Black Panther party leader and political prisoner; Heide Castañeda, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida; and moderators Patricia Baquedano-López; an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education; and Seth Holmes, an Associate Professor of Society and Environment and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Watch a video of the talk on this page, where we'll also have a transcript of talk posted later this week.
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New podcast episode
Monitoring corporate agribusiness
In the third episode of our podcast Who Belongs? released this week, hosts Marc Abizeid and Sara Grossman interview two guests: Elsadig Elsheikh, Director of the Global Justice Program at the Haas Institute, and Nadia Barhoum, a former Haas Institute researcher. They discussed the Haas Institute's new project called, "Shahidi: Corporations Decoded" which monitors the power, influence, and reach of agri-business corporations and their role in the global food crisis. Listen to the episode or read a transcript of the interview here, and find all episodes of Who Belongs? here.
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New Blog
Why Rent Control is Necessary, But Insufficient Alone
Our Program Manager Eli Moore published a new piece this week that details why rent control needs to be part of a comprehensive solution to the housing affordability crisis in California.
"Telling California renters that they cannot have the possibility of expanding rent control protections is telling millions of people to continue to endure the profound effects of the housing instability and poverty until some undefined time in the future when housing production might start to stabilize rents," Eli writes.
Eli is the co-author of a research brief published by the Haas Institute on rent control that has been extensively covered in the media. Spotlight on the issue of rent control has intensified in recent weeks ahead of the Nov. 6 election with Californians voting on a ballot measure on rent control.
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Director john a. powell discusses funders' role in fight for belonging at SCG Conference
Haas Institute Director john a. powell was a keynote speaker at the Southern California Grantmakers Conference, held last month, where he spoke about the role of funders in the larger fight against racism and other forms of othering in our society. In a conversation with Fred Ali, President and CEO of the Weingart Foundation, powell discussed why foundations and other funders should center "bridging" in their funding efforts. "That should be a part of your portfolio," powell concluded. Watch their dialogue.
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Economist Hilary Hoynes, chair of our Economic Disparities faculty research cluster, discussed how a proposed immigration policy could penalize legal residents for using public benefits in a recent segment for PBS. Watch the segment.
Research by Hoynes was also cited in an EdWeek article entitled "What the Trump Administration's Latest Attack on Immigrants Means for Kids." "Research by Hilary Hoynes and colleagues shows that SNAP benefits in early childhood led to positive adult health outcomes, higher earnings, and even lower likelihood of relying on SNAP as an adult. So denying millions of children this important resource would result in short-term increases in hunger and health problems, as well as long-term economic damage," the author writes.
Evan Bissell, the Haas Institute's Arts and Culture Strategy Coordinator, was quoted in a Richmond Confidential article on two new ordinances in Richmond that aim to help low income tenants find housing. The ordinances could help in “shifting one’s perceptions on who is on Section 8,” and making landlords see that, “those people are human just like anybody else,” Bissell said.
Senior Fellow Richard Rothstein explained why our national understanding of segregation will remain incomplete unless we face the history of residential redlining in the US in an interview with Tolerance.org. "Residential segregation is an unconstitutional creation of government, a violation of civil rights that should be remedied," Rothstein said.
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The Haas Institute is looking to fill the following position:
Find all our job openings posted on this page.
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Nov. 3, 2018: Citizenship Public Forum: The Journeys of Belonging. Jordi Savall's far-ranging program pays tribute to the enormous contributions of enslaved Africans to world culture. This public forum features an artist talk with Savall, a musical activity led by vocal activist Melanie DeMore, and a panel discussion exploring how outsider/subversive culture becomes part of the public sphere; how music is a key to how people understand each other; and, in the words of Jordi Savall, “What we share is more than what divides us.” Learn more.
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Nov. 6, 2018: Antíkoni: Staged Readings by Beth Piatote. In this modern, haunting adaptation of Sophocles’ classic tragedy Antigone, a Native American family is torn apart as they struggle over the fate of ancestral remains and their conflicting loyalties to different notions of tradition, law, and the price of sacrifice. Beth Piatote is a member of the Haas Institute's LGBTQ Citizenship cluster. Learn more.
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See all upcoming and past events here.
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