Community-based Racial Healing
Vision
The SIUE Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Center will serve as a model for community-based racial healing and change in the St. Louis-Metro East region. We seek to dismantle a hierarchy of human value by connecting community agencies already engaged in anti-racism work, establishing new relationships between those community agencies and SIUE, and preparing college and high school students to work alongside community members as agents of social change. We take an anti-colonial position that leverages our privilege as an economically and socially powerful institution. As equal partners with all stakeholders, we will establish authentic, trusting relationships for the upbuilding of sustainable communities where people of all backgrounds can thrive.
Goals
Goal #1: Campus and community stakeholders will have the knowledge, skills and courage to tell the truth regarding the ways in which racism has impacted our campus, region and relationships.
Goal #2: Campus and community stakeholders will develop authentic relationships based on trust, through which they can validate each other’s lived experience, see themselves in each other, and build a set of shared racial equity goals.
Goal #3: Campus and community stakeholders will establish a shared practice for actualizing racial equity that removes inequality and creates opportunity at the structural and systemic levels.
A long-term goal of the SIUE TRHT Campus Center is to establish a St. Louis Metro East Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Alliance. The purpose of the Alliance will be to bring together organizations, institutions and individuals who are committed to actualizing the vision of the broader TRHT campus center movement in order to prepare the next generation of strategic leaders and critical thinkers to break down racial hierarchies and dismantle the belief in the hierarchy of human value. The alliance members will share best practices and develop an action plan to advance racial equity in the St. Louis Metro East region.
Press releases:
- SIUE Helps Cleanup and Preserve Katherine Dunham’s East St. Louis Home
- SIUE Participates in the Emma L. Wilson King Foundation’s East St. Louis Family Fun Festival
