Statement published earlier remains relevant to us today in 2022 

In 2021 and beyond, we will fund actions and initiatives that are bold, imaginative, resourceful, and ingenious aimed at dismantling systemic, institutionalized, cultural, structural, and abject interpersonal racism and corresponding methods of asserting hierarchy.  Violence and distortions have caused centuries of harm to Black, Latinx, Native, Arab, and Asian Americans in addition to groups targeted by misguided differentiation of gender and gender identity; religion, visual, cognitive, sensory, mental, and physical disabiliity; creed; age, and sexual orientation. The wounds in our community have lasted all of our own and our ancestors’ lifetimes; and, they are acutely raw.  There has never been a more compelling time for steadfast resolve to effect radical change.  We have threats from Covid-19 and its effects that both exacerbate the inequities and make relevant action a matter of great urgency.

At the onset of grave illness in 2020, we named our focused response to a then new pandemic that is Covid-19.  We began with concern about the virus’s disproportionate effects on already vulnerable communities.  Make no mistake: we are not abandoning our concern for those affected by Covid-19.  Rather, we are honing and narrowing the definition of our focus yet again.  Data demonstrates the injustice that Black and Latinx communities have suffered grievous numbers of infections and deaths. The privilege of rooms in homes transformed into remote workspace rests disproportionately in white and suburban regions.  Urban neighborhoods have not experienced commensurate safeguards.

Mandates have defined “essential workers” who, in the delivery of services, are especially exposed to hazards.  The categorization of “essential workers” has included scores of “undocumented workers” who have been excluded from forms of federal and state assistance.  Families and individuals living in densely-populated spaces and apartment buildings have been unable to escape the potency of the virus’s spread.  Finally, persons repeatedly exposed to trauma have proven uniquely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.  Violence inside homes and within neighborhoods has grown and intensified in large part due to social isolation, abuse of power, and depletion of resources.