The Tamer Center for Social Enterprise is committed to educating leaders to use business knowledge, skills, and tools to address social and environmental challenges. The worldwide protests and Black Lives Matter movement have mobilized attention on the persistent problems of racial inequity that exist across America and in many countries. This movement has also highlighted the shared values and desire in our communities to advocate for social justice and an end to anti-Black violence, bias, and unequal treatment. In the United States, these racial divides are evident in education and health outcomes, income and wealth disparities, and the lack of representation across many spheres in society.
Social enterprise and business leaders should actively strive to be anti-racist in their own lives as well as within their organizations. This includes marshaling strategies, policies, people, and resources to more aggressively tackle the systemic racial inequities that exist in society, including within and across organizations. Our mission is integrally tied to training the next generation of effective social enterprise leaders. This means helping leaders to develop greater self-awareness of racism and its historical and systemic effects. It means providing spaces for deeper listening to voices of people who have been marginalized due to racism, and opportunities to practice and improve communication skills and have sometimes uncomfortable conversations about race. These are necessary conditions to help leaders to develop and implement a racial equity lens that can be infused in strategies and social justice initiatives at organizations, and for the constituencies that they serve. Centering this lens, to ensure these perspectives are not pushed to the margins, can help achieve inclusive and sustainable solutions that social enterprises are focused on achieving.
Whether you are working in business, public or the nonprofit sectors, are a social entrepreneur, sit on a nonprofit or company board, or are a volunteer, an intimate understanding of anti-racism, racial justice, and racial equity issues are critical first steps. It is our hope that these resources below will serve as a starting point to help you be an effective leader, ally, advocate, and change agent in any sector.
For business leaders and students interested in the intersection of race and the mass incarceration crisis in the United States, we also encourage you to engage in our ReEntry Acceleration Program (REAP). REAP has two main initiatives. The first involves training Columbia Business School MBA and EMBA students to teach business courses for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The second initiative is to develop tools for potential employers and forums to dramatically improve post-incarceration employment and entrepreneurship. We also partner with Columbia University's Center for Justice on Justice Through Code, which aims to expand the pipeline of talent for career track employment in the tech sector.
Columbia Business School's Executive Education also offers an open enrollment course: Advancing Racial Equity: Harnessing the Power of Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations, that may be of interest to leaders and managers looking to overcome the barriers that organizations face in increasing diversity and racial equity, and to explore a range of solutions and hands-on tools for creating more inclusive organizations.
The center is actively working on integrating racial equity in courses, experiential learning programs, research, and outreach activities that we offer on campus and beyond. Please contact us if you have suggestions on resources, organizations, or tangible initiatives not covered below.
What Data and Research Exist on the Economic Impact of Racism in the United States?
What Does it Mean to be Anti-racist?
Additional Resources
Faculty Insights on Overcoming Racial Inequity
- How Diversity Makes Us Smarter, by Katherine Phillips, management professor
- Maximizing the Gains and Minimizing the Pains of Diversity: A Policy Perspective, by Adam Galinksy, Andrew Todd, and Astrid Hogan, management and psychology professors
- Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests Ways to Improve Things, with Modupe Akinola, management professor
- The Urgency of Intersectionality, TED talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor
- Why Diversity Programs Fail, by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, sociology professors
- 3 Myths Plus a Few Best Practices for Achieving Diversity, by Victoria Plaut, law professor
Additional Faculty Resources
Career / Sector Areas
Corporate Responses, Commitments and Action
Philanthropy
Nonprofit and Public Management
Education
Health Care
Arts
- Cartography: A Black Woman’s Response to Museums in the Time of Racial Uprising (Dr. Porchia Moore, museum critical race theorist)
- Four Black Artists on How Racism Corrodes the Theater World (The New York Times)
- Museums as White Spaces (WNYC)
- Organizations:
- artEquity offers training and consulting services to individuals and organizations on creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion through the arts and culture.
- Unchained Stories is a social impact production company and media consulting firm that is creating a more just world through the power of stories.
- We See You W.A.T is a collective of multi-generational, multi-disciplinary, early career, emerging and established artists, theater managers, executives, students, administrators, dramaturges and producers, addressing the scope and pervasiveness of anti-Blackness and racism in the American theater.
Community Development and Financial Inclusion
- Investment Crowdfunding as an Economic Development Tool (Crowdfund Mainstreet)
- The Case for Accelerating Financial Inclusion in Black Communities (Mckinsey)
- The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and journalist, for The Atlantic)
- Trying to Correct Banking's Racial Imbalance (The New York Times)
- Why We Need Black-Owned Banks (NPR)
- Real Estate and Housing
- Organizations:
- ABFE promotes effective and responsive philanthropy in Black communities.
- Accion East makes small loans and provides technical assistance to immigrant or minority-owned small businesses; provides financial counseling at Single Stop sites throughout the city.
- Brooklyn Navy Yard believes that the industrial sector can and will flourish in New York, employing a diverse cross-section of New Yorkers in jobs that offer real career pathways.
- Community Resource Exchange (CRE), where Katie Leonberger ’08 is president and CEO, provides consulting services and professional development for social justice organizations.
- Local Civics, founded by Beverly Leon ’20, empowers students to be involved in their local communities and provides them with the digital resources and tools to grow into civic leaders.
- Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, where Justine Zinkin ’02 is CEO, provides financial-literacy training and financial services to residents of Washington Heights and provides one-on-one financial counseling at Single Stop sites throughout the city.
- The Bronx Community Relief Effort aims to raise $10 million to support effective, on-the-ground operations that are focused on meeting the most essential needs of the Bronx community, including filling gaps in public financing and broader grant programs.
- Venture Forward Now empowers and strengthens impact in the social sector through community building, professional development, advocacy, and innovation.
- We Act for Environmental Justice builds healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and/or low-income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
Nonprofit Boards
Impact Investing
Racial Equity Investing
Social Entrepreneurship
International Development
White Savior Industrial Complex
Green Business
Climate Change and Sustainability
