About Us

Vision

We aspire to see a healthy, healed Austin where all people can live well and thrive.

Values

Our culture is rooted in the following values:

Equity

Diversity

Interdependence

Interconnectedness

Integrity

Accountability

Transparency

Compassion

Part of our commitments is to promote racial healing throughout our city. In racial healing, we break down the barriers that separate and divide us and fuel a powerful movement to increase our capacity to heal and grow as individuals and as a community.

Under Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation we learn to look for commonalities that bring us together as human beings and bridge the gaps that divides us.

What is Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation?

Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation is a format developed by Gail Christopher over 10 years while she served as Vice President for Policy and Senior Advisor for the Kellogg Foundation. It has 5 major pillars that need to be changed in order to heal: Narrative Change, Racial Healing and Relationship Building, and Separation, Law, and Economy.

Launched in 2016, TRHT is a comprehensive, national, and community-based process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change, and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism. At its core, TRHT will unearth and jettison the deeply the held, and often unconscious bias throughout American culture and the perception of inferiority or superiority based on race, physical characteristics or place origin.

TRHT builds relationships and collective power at the community and institutional level. These relationships lay the groundwork for powerful systemic change, as participants reshape their communities’s institutions, policies, and practices.

The 5 pillars of TRHT framework are: Narrative Change, Racial Healing, and Relationship Building, Separation, Law and Economy. For more

For more information go to: https://healourcommunities.org/

TRHT Framework Components

• Narrative Change

Examining how to create and distribute new complex and complete narratives in entertainment, journalism, digital and social media, school curricula, museums, monuments, and parks and in the way we communicate that can influence people’s perspectives, perceptions and behaviors about and towards one another so that we can work more effectively and productively towards community-base change

• Racial Healing and Relationship Building

Focusing on ways for all of us to heal from the wounds of the past, to build mutually respectful relationships across racial and ethnic lines that honor and value each person’s humanity, and to build trusting intergenerational and diverse community relationships that better reflect our common humanity.

• Separation

Examining and finding ways to address segregation, colonization and concentrated poverty in neighborhoods to ultimately ensure equitable assess to health, education and jobs.

• Law

Reviewing discriminatory civil and criminal laws and the public policies that come from them and recommending solutions that will produce a just application of the law.

• Economy

Studying structured inequality and barriers to economic opportunities and recommending approaches that can create an equitable society.

With the permission of the Kellogg Foundation. For more information visit: https://healourcommunities.org/