United Way Wednesdays Examine Redlining and Equity
We're using our United Way Wednesday program each week of February and Black History Month to highlight the history and continued impact of neighborhood redlining in Topeka. We're also bringing back our social media takeover tradition and will be handing the reins to the team at Omni Circle the week of February 21.
Redlining Effects Can Still Be Felt
Though long since made illegal, redlining and its residual impact today remains one of the biggest challenges to racial equity in our community. As we state in our aspirational statement, we fight every day for a strong, healthy, and equitable community. Understanding the impact of redlining is important as we work with our partners to shape the policy, systems, and environment necessary for an equitable community.
Our three-part discussion started with defining redlining and showing what that looked like in our community. In our second installment, we sat down with local historian Donna Rae Pearson from the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library to talk about how redlining went on to impact neighborhoods throughout Topeka's history, from "urban renewal" to Brown v. Board of Education (both the original Brown case, as well as the subsequent cases). The third episode connected the history of redlining to our present day community health. By using tools like the City of Topeka's Neighborhood Health Map, we're able to see just what kind of legacy redlining has left in our community, and what that means today for the challenges in equity that we work to address.
You can find all three parts of this discussion on our Facebook video page, along with dozens of other United Way Wednesday videos covering topics that affect our community.
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Second Annual Social Media Takeover
Stay tuned to our social media the week of February 21 for a content takeover by Omni Circle, a Topeka-based collaborative workspace provider. Omni Circle is “building an inclusive environment, where we recognize that there are still inequities in our city especially surrounding race, that in many cases are getting worse and threaten our collective prosperity here in Topeka. With our Pro-Equity Action Plan we hope to establish a community where all people have equitable opportunities to thrive. Omni Circle offers a number of programs and initiatives designed to assist, and empower members while supporting educational institutions and organizations that are addressing the challenges of producing a pipeline for successful future leaders. Our goal is to help individuals of our community become the best versions of themselves, while proving them with resources and opportunities to achieve their desired goals and dreams.”