The Poverty & Race Research Action Council

I am executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) in Washington, D.C., the organization’s name reflecting the intersections that motivated its founding fathers and mothers (John powell, Alan Houseman, Florence Roisman, and John Charles Boger) more than a decade ago. We strive to connect the worlds of civil rights and antipoverty, and we link researchers working on race and poverty issues to activists working on those issues. PRRAC is funded primarily by foundations, although it is a quasi-foundation itself. The organization performs two major functions: networking and research support.

As part of our networking, we produce a 20–36-page bimonthly newsletter journal, Poverty & Race, periodic “best of P&R books,” and other publications, and we hold conferences. We’ve organized 11 all-day meetings so far, in various parts of the country, bringing together activists and race and poverty researchers who are mainly from university communities. Generally speaking, meeting participants have heard of and know a little bit about one another, but have never met—even though they live in the same community. The university is seen as a somewhat forbidding place that community groups feel they don’t have access to. Through these meetings, we hope to breach those walls so that academic activists, the ones who care about communities and race and poverty issues, can make themselves available to assist grassroots activists.

PRRAC’s support of research involves making small research grants, regranting funds furnished by foundations. The maximum amount given is $10,000, and we’ve made about 100 such grants to date (a descriptive listing of these is available on our website: www.prrac.org). Successful applicants must meet two requirements: The research must focus on the intersection of race and poverty, and it must be designed to support a planned advocacy agenda (legislative work, litigation, community organizing, educating the public, and so forth). In other words, it must be research designed to be used to advance social justice.

Among the lessons we’ve learned is that a small amount can go a long way in producing good research if grantees are committed to a project because it is needed—even if the budget must be stretched in order to complete the work. We have also learned that research conducted by nondisinterested parties has to be taken seriously when it’s done by competent people using sound methodology, even if the researchers are not traditionally credentialed—that judges, newspaper editors, legislators, policymakers, and the general public do take notice, despite the provenance of the research. Let me provide a concrete example: We funded a lawyer with the Legal Assistance Foundation in Chicago to conduct a simple interview study of children in homeless shelters. The group had been receiving anecdotal material that such children were not being bused to their home schools, nor were they able to retain needed special classes. The federal McKinney Act requires that children in homeless shelters receive an adequate education. After interviewing dozens of parents, children, teachers, and administrators, the lawyer we funded documented persuasively that clear violations of the McKinney Act were taking place. The Legal Assistance Foundation then took this research and used it in the two ways they had intended when they applied to us: They brought a suit against the City of Chicago and the Chicago Board of Education, which resulted in a very favorable settlement; and they took the research findings to the Illinois legislature, which enacted a much stronger set of state regulations governing the education of homeless children.

Advocacy and Research

One thing we’ve found is that not too many foundations are interested in providing support for this kind of work. Research-oriented foundations are notably hesitant to support any work that smells of advocacy; they feel that social science research should be done only by disinterested parties and published (eventually) in refereed journals. And the far fewer funders of advocacy work often fail to see the critical role targeted research can play in making advocacy more effective. Recently, there was about a two-year lapse when we were not able to give out any grants. Several months ago, I’m pleased to report, we got regrant money from the Joyce Foundation for work on education reform by community- and school-based groups.

PRRAC’s board members are all advocates, and we are recognized as being part of the advocacy community.

Getting foundations to understand that we function differently from most of them and that our relationship with our grantees is also different has been difficult. PRRAC’s board members are all advocates, and we are recognized as being part of the advocacy community. Generally, foundations are looked at in a somewhat instrumental way, often manipulated by grantees. Our relationship with our grantees is more of a partnership. We keep in touch with them at every stage. When the research is done, it is written up quite extensively, and we disseminate the results, making sure the work is published in our bimonthly newsletter journal. We regularly request and publish advocacy updates by the groups we fund, showing how the research is being used. In that way, we facilitate contacts with other groups around the country doing similar research and advocacy.

Beyond supporting research/advocacy projects submitted to us by others, on occasion the PRRAC board decides to initiate a project, sometimes devoting financial resources well beyond the $10,000 limit of our regranting program. As an example, right now, with Ford funding, we are studying the relationship between housing segregation and school segregation. The research is looking at ways in which all levels of government—federal, state, and local—have historically, through such means as zoning, highway programs, housing programs, code enforcement, urban renewal, and public housing placement, created and maintained segregated housing patterns, which patterns in turn have created and maintained segregated school patterns, as well as enormous wealth disparities between black and white populations in particular. Once this research—being conducted by a group of distinguished urban historians—is completed, we will put together a broad-based advocacy coalition that can address and act on the remedies: litigation, state or federal legislation, Congressional hearings, and other routes. We also are thinking of producing a film on the issue and creating teaching materials for law and public policy schools, colleges, and high schools. The project aims to challenge prevalent perceptions that current metropolitan patterns and disparities are essentially a function of market choices and personal preferences. In fact, they have been very much structured by what government has done in the past. And government now has certain obligations to remedy that.

Research conducted by nondisinterested parties has to be taken seriously when it’s done by competent people using sound methodology, even if the researchers are not traditionally credentialed.

PRRAC Resources

One of the most valuable elements in Poverty & Race, our bimonthly newsletter journal, is the Resources Section, which regularly lists some 100–150 recent studies and reports relevant to the race/poverty intersection. These are broken into subject categories: housing, education, welfare, employment, economic/community development, etc. Since we began publishing in 1992, we have listed some 7,000 of these items. It’s by far the most comprehensive compendium of such research, the majority of which was conducted by nonprofit groups and NGOs and therefore not likely to be found in library collections. We are just completing a project to create a user-friendly, easily accessible database, so that a group working on, say, the health of immigrants can locate all the studies and reports relevant to its work. The group can then attempt to secure the relevant reports, either from the originator or possibly from us, as we have in our library probably half the items we’ve listed.

The second, more ambitious element of this project is to identify the 500 or so most current and relevant studies, secure permission from copyright holders, and put the full items online—a big task, not only to vet the entire collection to identify those 500 studies and then secure permissions from the originators, but then to scan those from earlier days that were not produced electronically. This is an example of a fairly expensive project that foundations ought to support, bringing this valuable information resource into widespread use by activists of all sorts. The wealth of good work out there can be of enormous utility to current struggles if only it can be accessed.

We believe PRRAC is a model for foundation relationships with grantees, in particular around race and poverty issues and research and advocacy.