Toward becoming an anti-racist civic innovation team
As an ensemble, MONUM is grounded and rooted in a positive, life-affirming love for our Black friends, families, colleagues, business owners, artists, students, and the many other identities held, professions chosen, and endeavors undertaken by our diverse and resilient Black communities here in Boston. (To our Black communities and collaborators across the U.S., and around the world, we see you and love you, too.)
We mourn the loss of Black lives and Black futures. We grieve the lack of regard shown to Black people on our streets and sidewalks and in buildings both publicly and privately managed. We decry the continual inaction and cowardice that has repeatedly been shown as people of color, particularly Black folks, have called our collective attention to the deep mismatch between this country’s stated values and their lived experiences. We denounce and emphatically oppose the violence perpetrated against Black people across the United States by agencies of the government, including but not limited to law enforcement agencies.
Black lives matter.
We seek and believe in justice, care, liberation, joy and peace for all people. We amplify and uplift the Combahee River Collective’s Black feminist leadership, who wrote in Boston decades ago, “…We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
As a team within government ourselves, it is imperative that we use our platform, positionality, and privilege to advocate and agitate for justice and liberation from these interlocking oppressions.
We are entering our second decade of practice as a team. Moving forward, we commit ourselves and our team to anti-racism in civic innovation. We call on other public and/or civic innovation groups (and reporters, and funders, and the rest) in the field to do the same.
In alignment with Vision 1 in Resilient Boston — the city’s strategy for advancing resilience and racial equity — we will work with an external partner to conduct a racial equity analysis of MONUM’s past projects, partnerships, and work processes. We commit to continued critical self-reflection and interrogation of our team’s first ten years. Using these practices as grounding and a catalyst, we commit to engaging current and future partners (in all sectors) in critical dialogue on how they are embodying anti-racism, and ask them to hold us accountable to our commitments and push us to grow. Informed by Resilient Boston’s frameworks for advancing racial equity, we will develop anti-racist language to include in all contracts, statements of work, and offer letters from our team.
There can be no timidity in naming the racism that has enabled the philanthropies who fund the civic innovation field, and in questioning the “design thinking” that so often marginalizes and tokenizes the people who are closest to the pain in our communities. We commit to design justice, following the leadership of the Design Justice Network, and design for the margins, following the leadership of The Move.
We remain actively opposed to the oppressive systems that cause daily and intergenerational trauma to people of color in our city, like white supremacy, settler colonialism, redlining, heteropatriarchy, hyper-capitalism, police brutality, and the U.S. criminal legal system. Our hearts and bodies are heavy with the weight of these systemic injustices.
With our deepest love and most righteous anger,
The Mechanics
To see some items of inspiration that have helped ground our thinking in this moment — and some which have inspired us individually or collectively through time(s) and space(s)— see this post.
