Organizations & Resources

A place to start as you seek to live your Pledge to End Racism.

The following resources focus on the issues of race and racism on the Richmond Region and provide an excellent starting place for living your Pledge to End Racism. And of course, another great place to start is with our Living the Pledge to End Racism Workshop.

Our Community Partners

The following groups & organizations have adopted the Richmond Pledge to End Racism and are helping to create a network of support and commitment to anti-racist policies and ideas. Click on their logo to learn more about them. We hope your organization would consider joining us.

Richmond-Area Organizations

Black Lives Matter 804

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is an international activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence toward black people. This private Facebook Group for BLM 804 is designed to promote BLM events in the Richmond Metropolitan area.

Coming together Virginia (Previously Coming to the Table RVA)

Coming Together Virginia provides leadership, resources, and a supportive environment for all who wish to acknowledge and heal wounds from racism that is rooted in the United States’ history of slavery. Affiliated with Coming to the Table, the Richmond chapter is one of the most active in the country.

NAACP

The vision of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure a society in which all individuals have equal rights without discrimination based on race.

Poor People’s Campaign

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is uniting people across Virginia to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality of religious nationalism.

Virginia Contact: https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/stat e /virginia/

Richmonders Involved to Strengthen our Communities (RISC)

RISC is an organization made up of congregations from throughout Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield. Founded in 2002, we use the power of large numbers of organized people to solve critical community problems. We are not a direct service provider, rather we are a grassroots, direct action, multi-issue organization.

Richmond Hill

Founded in 1987, Richmond Hill is an ecumenical Christian fellowship and residential community who serve as stewards of an urban retreat center within the setting of a historic monastery. Our Mission is to seek God’s healing of Metropolitan Richmond through prayer, hospitality, racial reconciliation, and spiritual development.

The KOINONIA School of Race and Justice was developed by Richmond Hill in order to create a place for people of all races and backgrounds to have safe conversations around difficult topics pertaining to race and justice. The school and its programs are an opportunity to explore how our faith (beliefs and values) connect with the work of racial reconciliation.

Richmond Peace Education Center

Since 1980, the Richmond Peace Education Center has been an unwavering voice for peaceful conflict resolution, social justice, and nonviolent social change in the Richmond, Virginia region. Over the years the center has evolved, developing new programs and areas of focus to meet new concerns.

Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)

SURJ is a national network of groups and individuals organizing White people for racial justice through community organizing, mobilizing, and education. The Richmond Chapter (Facebook page) is active and growing in RVA.

Southerners on New Ground (SONG)

SONG is a home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LBGTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, intersectional analysis, and organizing.

Contact SONG National to connect with the Virginia SONG group.

Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities

The Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities works with schools, businesses, and communities to achieve success by addressing prejudices, in all forms, in order to improve academic achievement, increase workplace productivity, and enhance local trust. Through workshops, retreats, and customized programs that raise knowledge, motivation, and skills, VCIC develops leaders who work together to achieve success throughout the Commonwealth.

Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy

Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP) is a non-partisan coalition of 23,000 members including 700 faith communities and 1,000 clergy of all faiths and people of goodwill, all working for a more just society.

Books, Articles, & Guides

Richmond’s Unhealed History

By Rev. Benjamin Campbell

In a detailed look at the history of Richmond, Benjamin Campbell examines the contradictions and crises that have formed the city over more than four centuries. Campbell argues that the community of metropolitan Richmond is engaged in a decisive spiritual battle in the coming decade. He believes the city, more than any in the nation, has the potential for an unprecedented and historic achievement. Its citizens can redeem and fulfill the ideals of their ancestors, proving to the world that race and class can be conquered by the deliberate and prayerful intention of honest and dedicated citizens.

“Unhealed History”

An overview by the Rev. Ben Campbell of some of the issues he explores in his book of the same name. Style Weekly Feb 21, 2012 edition, cover story.

Redlining Richmond

In the late 1930s the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency created to refinance homes and prevent foreclosures, worked with local lenders and realtors to assess neighborhoods using a number of factors ranging from terrain to income levels to the “infiltration of a lower grade population” (by which they meant African Americans, Jews, and immigrants). Using these assessments they assigned a grade for each neighborhood’s “residential security.” This site focuses on the assessment surveys and map produced for Richmond, Virginia. Running throughout the assessment surveys collected by the HOLC is the issue of race, and this site allows you to investigate the centrality of race in the politics and on the landscape of Richmond in the late 1930s. John V. Moeser, senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, brought the HOLC assessment surveys and security map for Richmond to our attention and lent his expertise in the history of twentieth-century Richmond.

Videos

Conversations exploring education, housing, transportation, and economic development in the context of race and regionalism in the Richmond region. Presented by the Richmond Peace Education Center.