Toward an Abundant Future
A Storytelling Initiative by Living Cities + Gumbo Media
Living Cities has partnered with Gumbo Media to curate nuanced, dynamic storytelling about the history and impacts of race across six U.S. cities:
Albuquerque, NM
Austin, TX
Memphis, TN
Minneapolis, MN
Rochester, NY
St. Paul, MN
These stories engage in discussions of economic equity through the lenses of community justice, the creative economy, homeownership, and small business.
Welcome to a more courageous conversation.
A New Foundation
Published in 2024
A New Foundation seeks a more abundant and dignified future where wealth is a tool for catalyzing human flourishing and honoring intrinsic prosperity.
This editorial ensemble examines the language and systematic realities of generational wealth building through the lenses of homeownership and business starts and growth. Anchoring in the six Homeownership and Business Ownership cohort cities, we utilize qualitative and quantitative data to analyze racist systems and generations-old inequities in wealth.
A New Foundation uses human-centered storytelling and creative expression to highlight existing abundance in BIPOC communities and push our imaginations about what is possible when we organize and ask: What does it look like to shift the center of wealth away from whiteness? What does it mean that the communities with the least historical monetary wealth are often the richest in culture, art, and expression? What would be the impact of reorienting our comprehension of wealth as something more human, more dignified for all?
Why A New Foundation?
Wealth is a tool through which the new majority can sustain freedom and interpersonal sovereignty. In these stories, we shift focus to a deeper resource, where wealth resides in what we do with and for community. A New Foundation galvanizes a culture of communal uplift, where wealth is realized through sustained joy and fulfilled needs. We encourage you to join us as we absorb conscientiously and curiously, question critically, and continue to reimagine radically.
Guiding Questions
How do underserved communities define wealth when they've never had it?
How can memory and storytelling be cultivated to build new foundations?
How have wealth-building strategies such as homeownership and entrepreneurship been designed to create the current inequitable economy?
How are anti-racist community organizers working to redirect the center of wealth away from whiteness to a definition of wealth that is sustainable, dignified, and fully attainable for all?
Reckoning With Race
Published in 2021
Each of the stories in Reckoning With Race is unique, ranging from a personal account of how highway construction in Austin, TX, has pushed Black folks out of their homes to a work of magical realism in which a Black organizer in Minneapolis is visited by the spirits of recent ancestors slain by the police. They each represent just one among many stories of race in each city, but together, they reflect how anti-Blackness is foundational to the structures that harm Black, Indigenous, and people of color in the United States and how communities of color have embodied hope even in the face of that harm.
An important step in the Homeownership and Business Ownership cohort cities' journey is taking the time to learn about their histories, how their cities were designed to create inequitable outcomes, and who has been organizing for racial justice throughout. This process of reckoning with the history of race—in part by engaging with the Reckoning With Race stories and storytellers—is directly informing the way that cities are being assisted to transform government policies and practices.
Why Reckoning With Race?
Reckoning With Race is an initiative of the Closing the Gaps Network, a ten-year initiative that brings together leaders from cities across the country who are committed to imagining what an anti-racist society might look like, and to playing an important role in building it through the transformation of government policies, practices and operations.
Discussion Guide
We invite you to join us in reckoning with race. The reflections, discoveries and truths expressed in these six stories are applicable to every city in the U.S. We’ve crafted the following discussion guide to support you in your reading, and to ensure the lessons gathered here live beyond the page.
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