Children’s Institute offers our staff voluntary Racial Justice Lunch and Learn Meetings. Attendance is consistent and strong; some staff attend regularly; others attend occasionally; we all have something to share and we are all learners. We've also invited Children’s Institute Board Members and our colleagues at Roc the Future and Common Ground to join with us as we work toward our personal and collective Cultural Humility goals. With funding from the Greater Rochester Health Foundation, we are making the content and format of these learning sessions accessible to the community.

Racial Justice Lunch and Learns are offered because they were easily doable within the workweek and help us move our organization forward. As Children’s Institute staff strives to understand America’s, our organization’s, and our own personal history with racism, especially as it pertains to anti-Black racism, several of the Racial Justice offerings were selected to provide knowledge “building blocks.” Videos were chosen to highlight key issues, writers and leaders, or current events such as COVID-19, the killings of George Floyd and Daniel Prude, the Black Lives Matter protests, violence against Asians and Pacific Islanders, or the national response to Critical Race Theory.

Almost all links for the Racial Justice Lunch and learns are free, available content on YouTube (usually Ted Talks) and do not in any way belong to Children’s Institute. “Additional resources”–articles and podcasts–are shared as relevant to the day’s topic and are mostly accessible links to all. However, at times a link may be behind a paywall (e.g., New York Times article) and is not (yet) available to anyone who is not a subscriber.

Our offerings to date are far from comprehensive in terms of addressing the history of race, power, and privilege in this country. However, as Children’s Institute continues to learn together, we will share additional content addressing racism targeting Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Muslims, and other communities of color. If your organization finds useful content, please share that as well by sending it to Ellen Leopold. We thank the United Way 21 Day Challenge for two videos that we chose to show as part of our Lunch and Learns.

Format outlining our processes for the Zoom Lunch and Learn Meetings

** NEW ** since September 2023:

• Juneteenth
• Language Barriers and Child Translators
• Othering and Belonging with John A Powell
• Segregation in the Rochester City School District & Justin Murphy
• Using Latina, Latino, Latine or LatinX
• Using the Term BIPOC