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 held, and often unconscious, beliefs created by racism – the main one being the belief in a “hierarchy of human value.” This belief has fueled racism and conscious and unconscious bias throughout American culture and the perception of inferiority or superiority based on race, physical characteristics or place of origin.

TRHT will help communities across the U.S. embrace racial healing and uproot the conscious and unconscious belief in a hierarchy of human value that limits equal access to quality education, fulfilling employment, safe neighborhoods, equal housing opportunities and quality health care. Unless the central belief system that fuels racial, ethnic, and place of origin inequities is challenged and changed, societal progress cannot be sustained over time.

Throughout its 2016 design phase, WKKF worked with 176 leaders and scholars as representatives of more than 144 national TRHT individual and organizational partners, with a reach of more than 289 million people. The result of those efforts was a set of recommendations and an Implementation Guide to inform community-based TRHT processes. In 2017, there are multi-sector collaborations of people in 14 places across the United States who have received Kellogg Foundation grants, in addition to other national, regional and local funding, to implement a TRHT process.

TRHT is a national effort and throughout the next two-to-five years there will be place-based TRHT processes in 14 communities, including: (1) State of Alaska; (2) Baton Rouge and (3) New Orleans, Louisiana; (4) Buffalo, New York; (5) Chicago, Illinois; (6) Dallas, Texas; (7) Los Angeles, California; (8) Richmond, Virginia; (9) Selma, Alabama; (10) Saint Paul, Minnesota; and (11) Battle Creek, (12) Flint, (13) Kalamazoo and (14) Lansing, Michigan. There are also other TRHT-related efforts happening nationally. A primary example being the work of the Association of American Colleges & Universities and their work to establish TRHT Centers at 30 schools across the U.S.

As voluntary partners, the individuals and organizations all submitted letters of interest and commitment to the TRHT during the design phase. Each individual and organization was asked to agree to the TRHT Guiding Principles throughout the design phase and beyond. Going forward, many of the organizations are utilizing the implementation recommendations within their organizations and are making themselves available to the TRHT place efforts as resources in their areas of knowledge and influence.

The Kellogg Foundation has had a decades-long commitment to advancing racial equity and racial healing nationally and in communities. In the most recent 10 years of investment in these areas, the work revealed a clear need to focus more energy, resources and discourse on uprooting and eliminating the false ideology of a hierarchy of human value so that all of us could begin to effectively transform the places we live, learn work and play. The TRHT was launched as a way to co-develop a process by which communities and this country could begin doing that.

Across the world, TRCs are well known, having been implemented more than 40 times, but the TRHT is focusing less on reconciliation and much more on healing and transformation. To reconcile connotes restoration of friendly relations – “reuniting” or “bringing together again after conflict.” But the U.S. needs transformation: the nation was conceived in the Constitution and built on this belief in racial hierarchy, a collective national consciousness that has dominated the educational, economic, social and legal discourse for centuries. While, as well noted, resistance and episodic movements through history have contributed to measurable progress, the TRHT will provide needed, collective commitment and long-term determination to embrace a new narrative for the country, a belief in equal humanity for all people.

During its design phase in 2016, the Kellogg Foundation began receiving calls inquiring about its TRHT process from communities looking for assistance in responding to significant local racial incidents. This foundation heard this need and wanted to connect the need to its larger and ongoing efforts to advance racial equity and racial healing. Because, while the TRHT is not a framework for responding to incidents as they happen, it can help communities in addressing the underlying root cause of why these incidents often happen in the first place – structural racism. Ultimately, the foundation selected the 14 places based on the calls it received from communities who indicated their readiness as well as communities where the foundation already had active priority place-based work. In terms of criteria, the foundation selected TRHT places based on three factors: (1) interest and commitment to TRHT; (2) history of that place; and (3) readiness for a TRHT process. Each TRHT place submitted a concept paper drafted by a multi-sector coalition and through the review of the paper and proposal, the final 14 were selected.

In 2017, the Kellogg Foundation committed approximately $24 million over the next two-to-five years to 14 TRHT places. Each place received a grant investment for implementing their TRHT and in a growth fund to sustain the work for the long-term locally. The growth fund is also a place where additional funding is being raised and matched by other national, regional and local foundations. The investments in each place range from approximately $1.5 to $4 million and implementation can be from two-to-five years.

At this time, the Kellogg Foundation is not actively seeking proposals from other places interested in doing a TRHT process. There are a few active conversations in priority places in which WKKF does additional work related to its mission – about potential TRHTs in the future. However, the TRHT Implementation Guide available on racialequityresourceguide.org is available to anyone interested in learning and applying the TRHT process for individuals, an organization, a community or a tribe.

To heal is to restore to wholeness; to repair damage; and to set right. Healing a societal racial divide requires recognition of the need to acknowledge the wrongs of the past, while addressing the consequences of those wrongs.

Yes. The TRHT process is a comprehensive effort. It does include conversation and dialogue as essential components to make it work. However, after participants get to know one another and build relationships, the process also involves developing a plan for creating transformational change in one or more areas: the economy, the law and in separation – the things that keep us a part like residential segregation and colonization.

The Kellogg Foundation believes that racism affects all people from all backgrounds. Racial healing is a process that can benefit all people because, regardless of background, we are all living in and affected by the same racialized world. It is our belief that because of this, all of us can benefit from participating in racial healing work and the deep, meaningful relationships that can emerge. And, we believe that is all of our responsibilities to make it happen. It is not one person’s, one group’s or one organization’s responsibility. The responsibility belongs to all of us.

Narrative change means examining how to create and distribute new narratives in entertainment, the media, school curricula, museums, monuments and parks, and in the ways 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-based change. At times this may mean that we need to tell necessary and uncomfortable truths. This can be restorative because it can acknowledge the pain and suffering of racism and the resistance and resilience of those impacted. The TRHT supports people of all ages, races, ethnicities, faiths, cultures and socioeconomic statuses coming together to shape narratives about the past, present, and future – complete and accurate stories that honor the full complexity of our humanity as the country forges a more equitable future.