It’s a RepGen core belief that all Americans will experience positive individual and societal benefits from reparations and racial wealth equity. Since 2021 we’ve been surveying, interviewing, and co-creating with you, our RepGen network to reflect and assess if and how all of us benefit from Reparations. We’re excited to partner with Reparations Finance Lab (RFL) in these important efforts.
Since 2021, we’ve been surveying, interviewing, and co-creating with you, our RepGen network to reflect and assess if and how this is true. The unique data and stories from our Homeownership (HORT) and Community Engagement pilot programs do inch us forward in making the case – across our communities – that reparative acts positively impact all of us! Thank you to all who’ve participated in our brief surveys and interviews and as our thought partners. It’s quite joyful and very moving.
Speaking of partners, we’re excited to welcome the Reparations Finance Lab (RFL) into our evaluation and thought partner family. This partnership represents a pivotal step in our collective mission to advance reparative justice. Founded by Enith Williams after her international career in economic and social development and finance, RFL is a financial services non-profit dedicated to encouraging and facilitating private sector allocation of reparative capital to the descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade globally. RFL’s models collect and measure community-level data for harm and repair and can enhance RepGen’s evaluation approach. Simultaneously, RepGen’s reparations-in-action models allow RFL to test and develop its innovative methods in actual, not just theoretical contexts, like the HORT 2.0 Pilot in Detroit.
Both RepGen and RFL are grounded in the Social Determinants of Health framework. This fall RFL will overlay its Racial Repair Index onto RepGen’s reparative-transfer and community engagement & activation program data. We aim to generate actionable insights that will lay the groundwork for the future development of these core programs, furthering our shared goal of closing the racial wealth gap and advancing a federal reparations program for Black descendants of enslaved Americans.