eyeglasses on top of open notebook

Research at Large

IARA’s portfolio of research focuses on sector-specific interests and critical evaluation of antiracist structures and policies within private, nonprofit, public/government, and academic institutions at large. By documenting and understanding the field of “diversity” and antiracist training groups, as well as organizations that have sought to engage in antiracist change and the standards by which they have been held accountable, IARA seeks to develop critical measures for establishing antiracist institutional accountability.

doctor holding and looking at phone

Antiracist Interventions in Healthcare

There is a large body of research on how systemic racism drives the social determinants of health in communities of color but much less on how to solve this problem. Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, IARA is studying successful interventions that improve health outcomes and foster an antiracist healthcare system.

The existing field of research on systemic racism is populated predominantly with data on how racism structurally dominates organizations and impacts the social determinants of health. There remains a shortage of research on successful interventions and policy changes that directly address these inequities. Accountability frameworks and benchmarks allow for evaluating effectiveness, provide organizations with a road map to success, and allow stakeholders to hold themselves to these standards. These frameworks outline and identify what success looks like when it comes to race equity. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), IARA is assessing, analyzing, and documenting effective measures of healthcare organizations engaging in internally focused antiracist change. 

These frameworks and case studies will act as a road map and guide for organizations to determine the best next steps in their own institutional antiracist work. 

Supported by:

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Global Processes of Justice, Truth–Telling and Healing

IARA is currently engaged in a three-year project, supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to survey international examples of truth-telling and harm repair, including truth commissions and tribunals. The goal is to better understand what accountability looks like for these endeavors and what lessons we can learn going forward.

At IARA, we measure the impact and effectiveness of racial equity organizational transformation, in order to promote organizational capacity building. With funding from the Kellogg Foundation, IARA is assessing global practices of racial healing from inception to implementation and establishing guidelines based on this assessment. The main intent of the project is to create generalizable knowledge about the truth-telling, healing, and accountability processes that have been effective

Specifically, IARA is conducting an overview of historical and current practices in the field of racial healing with a lens on what has been shown to be successful and what the ongoing challenges are. IARA will provide a comprehensive body of knowledge on racial healing combined with recommendations for employing racial healing as a method of community and organizational transformation. 

IARA’s goal is to delve into the impact of global historical truth and reconciliation work at the national and community levels. We are documenting components of the model that make it effective. We expect to answer the following key questions:

  1. What makes the racial healing framework successful? 
  2. Where is there room for improvement? 
  3. What can this learning teach the racial equity/healing field? 
  4. What are the best means for sharing takeaways, resources, and practices with other countries, cities, and counties for scaling their own efforts in antiracist community-driven organizing? 

To conduct this work, IARA is mapping organizations and their stakeholders and is using existing documents, publications, evaluation and learning data, community-driven models, and key informant interviews to analyze, understand and assess outcomes and impact. As a result of this project, IARA will produce a final knowledge product and disseminate these findings broadly,  contributing to the racial equity space and the understanding of racial healing. 

Private Sector

With its emerging work in the private sector, IARA envisions the establishment of national accountability standards for corporate racial equity efforts. This project seeks to support landscape actors in developing and using standards to measure the impact of these efforts against their stated goals, in response to perspectives of people of color impacted on the ground, and by using public disclosure of data on outcomes as means for public accountability reporting.