Facing Race: A National Conference in St. Louis, MO — November 20-22, 2024

Sabeel Rahman

President and CEO | Demos

K. Sabeel Rahman is the President of Demos, an Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and the co-author of Civic Power, which looks at how to build a more inclusive and empowered bottom-up democracy. His academic research focuses on issues of democracy, economic power, law, and inequality. He has worked extensively with a range of think tanks, advocacy organizations, and foundations to develop novel approaches to addressing these issues in practice. He earned his law degree and doctorate at Harvard University, and his Masters degrees at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.


Presentations from Facing Race 2020

Forging A Just, Multiracial Democracy Through Cross Racial Movement Building Part 2

American demographics are changing. By 2050, the U.S. population will become predominantly people of color. Even today, we see the importance of building Dr. King’s “Beloved Community.” Toward this end, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation has brought nine leading national racial justice organizations into community with each other, a cross-racial coalition collectively known as the Racial Equity Anchor Institutions (the “Anchors”). They are: Advancement Project, Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, Demos, Faith in Action, NAACP, National Congress of American Indians, National Urban League, Race Forward, and UnidosUS. This session will feature the Anchor organization principals discussing the nature and value of their joint work. It will share how they have learned to work together (which hasn’t always been easy or smooth), and the promising ways they are collaborating to ensure a robust, inclusive democracy, leading to the Beloved Community. By creating multi-racial messaging campaigns, the Anchors have advanced an empowering vision of common purpose and destiny. Overcoming the greatest challenges our nation faces depends on such collaboration, healing, learning, and growing together. The Anchors’ joint work has empowered their shared racial equity priorities, while also cultivating stronger multi-racial coalitions at the local level. Session attendees will learn about the benefits of strategic trust building and structured collaboration, key research findings about communities of color, effective strategies for increasing turnout in elections, responding to contested elections and Census participation, and insightful perspectives on how and why to grow multi-racial movements nationally and locally.

Speakers: Sabeel Rahman, Marc Morial, Derrick Johnson, Judith Browne Dianis