Here’s how nearly $1.2 million in grants promote racial equity in the Fort Worth area
The North Texas Community Foundation has made over $1 million in grants to racial equity driven organizations, hoping to eliminate racial bias and discrimination.
The latest round of the Fund to Advance Racial Equity grants totals $577,500 and brings the total of grants since the fund started in 2020 to nearly $1.2 million.
“We have seen disparate outcomes around health and education, and we know that it’s incumbent upon all of us to do everything we can to make sure this community’s strong for the future,” said the foundation’s CEO, Rose Bradshaw.
Among the list of 21 new grantees are the National Juneteenth Museum, voting organization March to the Polls, the Fort Worth Opera, the City of Fort Worth’s police oversight monitor’s office and others.
“At the Community Foundation, we help our fund holders really invest for impact in all the different projects across the community,” Bradshaw said.
A grant committee, called the Advisory Council, decides what organizations will receive the racial equity funds, Bradshaw said. The council is made up of around 20 community leaders from diverse backgrounds with racial equity expertise. All grantees fall in one of three of the grant priority areas: strengthening community and police relations, building community leadership and building understanding between different racial groups, according to a news release.
“If we all have equal opportunities for education and health care and employment then our community is going to be all the better for it,” Bradshaw said.
Previous grants have been used to hire new positions at organizations like DNAWORKS, which promotes racial healing through the arts. Another previous recipient working to diversify Fort Worth’s nonprofit boards called BoardBuild won a second grant this year. Brave/R Together, an organization dedicated to improving outcomes and life expectancy for residents of 76104, also made the list for the second time.
The Fort Worth Japanese Society’s president, Harvey Yamagata, said he felt grateful when he heard the 37-year-old society won a grant.
The group is made up of around 350 members who are mainly families and individuals.
“We don’t have an opportunity to make a lot of money for maintaining our building and providing our programs, so grants are especially helpful to us,” Yamagata said.
The group plans to use the funds to produce a documentary on the history of Japanese migration in the area. Yamagata said many Japanese Americans migrated because they married Air Force service members or settled after their internment in World War II. But the stories are varied, Yamagata said. His own parents moved when their business was bought by a larger American company.
“We want to record the migration process and to also show some of the hardships that they endured in order to survive and succeed,” he said.
Yamagata said the group hopes the documentary will play in museums across the country, such as the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Smithsonian.
The recipients of the latest round of the Fund to Advance Racial Equity are:
- BarbaraCares
- Brave/R Together
- Children at Risk
- City of Fort Worth, Neighborhood Services Department
- Community Frontline
- DNAWORKS
- Fort Worth Japanese Society
- Fort Worth Opera
- March to the Polls
- Maroon 9 Community Enrichment Organization
- National Juneteenth Museum
- Transform 1012 N. Main Street
- Big Brothers Big Sisters Lone Star
- City of Fort Worth, Office of the Police Oversight Monitor
- One CommunityUSA
- BoardBuild
- Jolt Initiative
- Leadership Fort Worth
- Leadership ISD
- LVTRise
- Northside Inter-Community Agency
