We stand at a transformative moment in US history poised to change the racial, economic, and social landscape, which has been built on racist, sexist, and exploitative practices. These times are filled with collective rage and pain at the injustice and senseless racist killings and violence, as well as unspeakable hope, solidarity, and possibility.

Rallying calls from black social justice activists and movements catalyzed around 'Black Lives Matter', many of which have been led and organized by black women and teenage girls, have sparked protests and solidarity in all of the 50 states and around the world. These brave activists and allies have been slandered and called domestic terrorists. They have been abused, harassed, threatened, experienced violence and even killed for their defense and promotion of the fundamental values of justice, equality, and respect.

Significant wins are already being achieved after nearly three weeks of protest following the death of George Floyd on May 25 and on the heels of the murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and so many more. For example, the Minnesota and Los Angeles police departments have been defunded and capital redistributed to support social programs and services supporting communities of color.  

And so much work remains to be done in unraveling the implicit and explicit racism and biases that have been interwoven into our cultural, social, and institutional fabric. It is a great moment to understand white privilege and how deeply racism is embedded within our core institutions, like education, politics, justice, security, military, etc. We must actively challenge and take responsibility for restorative action, justice, and equality.

Make no mistake, these wins of today have been due to hard organizing work over the past decades, including the civil rights movement, and generations of opposition in Black communities to systemic racism and the legacy of slavery. The power of movements is telling, revolutionary in its ability to progress human rights as we are witnessing today.

We stand in solidarity with and in deep support of racial justice activists and movements fighting to end racist discrimination and state violence in all forms.

At ImpactMapper, we are social justice evaluators and technologists that help organizations, donors, and movements focused on social justice and human rights tell their story through data. Our company was born from feminist, social justice, and human rights movements' calls for the need of a different way of measuring impact that moved beyond log frames and quantitative metrics to one that was rooted in people's experiences, voices, and stories of change. We have taken time to reflect on our role, question our own privileges, and identify our commitments to racial justice. A few of them are shared here.

What we are committing to:

We will continue to deepen our commitment to diverse hiring and leadership. We are a small woman-owned business and social enterprise founded on the values of diversity, social justice, equality, and feminism. The majority of our leadership identify as women, and all identify as intersectional feminists. We all come from diverse racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, and class backgrounds. We are proud of this diversity, and continue to champion it in our internal operations - from meetings to the way we work as a team. We are also committed to being an actively anti-racist company. We commit to increasing our education on white and class privilege, and racism.

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We commit to offering black and racial justice organizations free access to our survey tool through the end of 2020 to track the impact of their work. Interested nonprofit organizations can sign up here over the next month!

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We commit to enhancing our support to black communities and racial justice communities by holding a series of at least three webinars over the next six months, bringing together philanthropists and nonprofit organizations to share innovative solutions in tracking impact and racial change justice, anti-violence and community building work and sharing these stories and evidence of impact in dynamic, powerful, and creative ways.

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We commit to increasing our outreach to black and racial justice groups and movements to document their outcomes through our Key to Change project. This project aims to build the largest database of long-term, decade long outcomes from women's rights movement building groups. We are documenting the strategies that are working and those that are not. The results will be public and searchable to support communities in learning about other successful efforts and to facilitate new connections between those doing similar work. In addition, the results will help build the evidence base for strategies that work in building a powerful movement and highlight why donors should increase their investment to these groups that focus on longer-term systemic changes in gender equality, racism, and our social institutions, education, religion, politics, social services, justice and police system, etc.

We welcome other suggestions for how we can support the BLM movement and racial justice activists. Please be in touch for feedback and other ways that we can support the movement.

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