Gratitude situates one well to know what can be and must be done to challenge inequity.
It situates one to see opportunity where others see despair.  ~ Lucas Johnson

Message from The Gratefulness Team:

As our organization commits to engaging with and supporting anti-racist work, we share these resources with you as an invitation to join us in learning, taking action, and working toward individual and collective change. We offer this compilation as a starting point with the recognition that the work extends far beyond what’s included here and happens over the course of a lifetime.

How Race Was Made
For much of human history, people viewed themselves as members of tribes or nations but had no notion of “race.” Today, science deems race biologically meaningless. Who invented race as we know it, and why? By John Biewen, with guest Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Black Lives Matter
A global organization that campaigns against violence and systemic racism toward black people.

What Black Lives Matter Means (and Why It’s Problematic to Say “All Lives Matter”)
(Good Housekeeping) Why saying that black lives matter doesn’t mean that other lives do not.

Free Racialized Trauma 5-Day eCourse
“Moving from race to culture is important, transformative, and takes work. A lot of work. I help people, communities, and organizations find strength in healing that is holistic and resilient. Together let’s set a course for healing historical and racialized trauma carried in the body and the soul. I am a healer. I help people rise through the suffering’s edge. I am a cultural trauma navigator. I am a communal provocateur and coach. I consider it my job in this moment to make the invisible visible.” – Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP.

Our Mental Health Minute
A video series created by psychologists Riana Anderson and Shawn Jones to provide mental health resources for the Black community.

Fearless Dialogues
Fearless Dialogues is a grassroots organization committed to creating unique spaces for unlikely partners to engage in hard heartfelt conversations that see gifts in others, hear value in stories, and work for change and positive transformation in self and other.

Anti-Racist Resources from Greater Good
The Greater Good, a magazine that turns scientific research into stories, tips, and tools for a happier life and a more compassionate society, have gathered here pieces that explore our potential to reduce prejudice in society and in ourselves. You can read their latest coverage on racism, diversity, and bridging differences along with key articles addressing:
The psychological roots of racism
How to overcome bias in yourself
Confronting racism
Reducing bias in criminal justice
Building bridges
Resources for parents
Resources for educators

Resources from The OnBeing Project
From the May 30 edition of The Pause newsletter, penned by Krista Tippett: “The question of ‘who we will be to each other’ has been surfacing ever more insistently across my conversations for over a decade, and its civilizational implications have now been laid bare in our economies, our politics, and our cultures.” The newsletter shares the following resources:

More Beautiful  – James Baldwin said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” Imani Perry embodies that prism. For the past few years, Perry has been pondering the notions of slow work and resistant joy as she writes about what it means to raise her two black sons — as a thinker and writer at the intersection of law, race, culture, and literature. This live conversation was recorded at the Chautauqua Institution.

The Spiritual Work of Black Lives Matter  – Black Lives Matter co-founder and artist Patrisse Cullors presents a luminous vision of the spiritual core of Black Lives Matter and a resilient world in the making. She joins Dr. Robert Ross, a physician and philanthropist on the cutting edge of learning how trauma can be healed in bodies and communities. A cross-generational reflection on evolving social change.

A Small Needful Fact  – A beautiful poem by Ross Gay honoring Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality.

Let’s Talk About Whiteness  – This conversation was inspired by Eula Biss’s stunning New York Times essay “White Debt,” which had this metaphor at its core: ”The state of white life is that we’re living in a house we believe we own but that we’ve never paid off.” She spoke with us in 2016 and we aired this last year, but we might just put this conversation out every year, as we’re all novices on this territory. Eula Biss had been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — and how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.

Civil Conversations & Social Healing – The Civil Conversations and Social Healing team represents The On Being Project’s presence in the world as they nourish, embolden and accompany the work of social healing. Their organizational capacities to produce audio and digital resources are strengthened by programs and convenings that stitch relationships across rupture and equip for resilience and repair.

Video Recordings: Spirituality and Social Change Symposium
The UMass Amherst Libraries and A Network for Grateful Living presented a dynamic afternoon of conversation, poetry, music, and meditation that explored the landscape of engaged spiritual practice and action for social change on September 27, 2019 at the UMass Fine Arts Center, Amherst, MA.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~ Arthur Ashe