Throughout 2020, the ASU Lodestar Center's Public Allies Arizona program invited the nonprofit community to its biweekly Discussions on Equity. This series has now ended.

Welcome Allies, Friends and Family,

Discussions on Equity was facilitated by Public Allies Arizona, an AmeriCorps program based at the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation.

This was an engagement group to read, listen, and discuss resources about how to be better Allies in underrepresented communities. This group began in summer 2020 by focusing on anti-racism.

The topics in our series were scaffolded to make them more accessible. We hosted discussion sessions every second and fourth Tuesday of the month, working through the materials and unpackaging the topic of racial justice and systems of oppression in Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color (POC) and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) communities and elevating our own voices in support of inclusive spaces and systematic changes.

Our group leaders from Public Allies Arizona are white facilitators using resources that have been widely distributed by other white ally accountability groups such as Stand Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) who partner extensively with Black community organizations when developing their educational materials and talking points.

Topics

• Love and rage
• Radical trans* resistance of the 1960s
• Black/Trans/Los Angeles
• Accountability and actions
• State-sanctioned terror and abolition
• History of Black America: Bringing a folding chair to the table
• What is white culture? Why is it so hard to define?
• The difficult discussion: Moving from tools to talking
• Setting intentions/actions moving into anti-racism
• Systemic racism and unconscious bias