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

Miriam Messinger

Director of Practice | Interaction Institute for Social Change
Pronouns: she/her/hers
At IISC, Miriam is Director of Practice and works on strategy, staff development, assessment, and client work focused on racial equity change efforts and health equity. Miriam has devoted much of her professional life to working to ensure that communities are healthy – with resources, a sense of connectedness, and engaged residents driving community development. Prior to IISC, Miriam was an independent consultant helping foundations and non‐profits work towards their visions by addressing challenges with passion, excellence, and stakeholder inclusion. Earlier in her career, Miriam loved mentoring, learning, and building organizational capacity while executive director of The City School.

Presentations from Facing Race 2024

Real Talk About Building Organizational Capacity for Racial Equity: A Peer Exchange

Do you fund or build organizational capacity for racial justice? If you facilitate or fund learning, strategy development, healing, team building, coaching, organizational change, and more to advance racial justice, this session is for you.

In this generative peer exchange, we’ll build community and share ideas about engaging tough issues, including:

*Embodying racial justice in organizational operations and programming
*Countering the attacks on equity and inclusion, and retrenchment on racial justice commitments
*Power dynamics between BIPOC groups
*Accountable whiteness
*Building and redistributing power to develop a racially just and liberatory culture

This session will include community building, peer exchanges, and space for emerging ideas. We will reflect on power and break into peer-exchange groups to explore specific questions, including: what does accountability look like? How can we be advocates for capacity building work that embodies racial justice? What is our responsibility in this post-election time to contribute to the movement for racial justice?

Facilitators are from the Deep Equity Practitioners Network (DEPn), a network focused on creating spaces for learning and strengthening the racial justice capacity building field. Founded at Facing Race 2018, when Race Forward organized a pre-conference session for capacity builders where participants lifted up shared values, a vision of liberated organizations and communities, DEPn is working to build a space to explore different approaches to building organizational capacity, ways to build power that advances racial justice in and through organizations, and ways to influence the ecosystem that supports capacity building work.

Speakers: Cynthia Silva Parker, Miriam Messinger, Mercedes Brown

Presentations from Facing Race 2022

Let’s fight the return of the “Old Normal!” - Leading for Liberatory Systems and Racial Justice Transformation

Are you fighting the “return to normal”? Unsure about what “new normal” looks like? Marian Wright Edelman taught us that “You can't be what you can't see.” So we’re going to spend some time trying to see the new normal together. These past few years have taxed racial justice leaders and organizations in unimaginable ways. Join us for a moment of collective hope. We’ll co-create visions of racial justice in practice, sharing stories that feed our collective imagination. We’ll strategize about leading our organizations and networks out of “old normal” white supremacist systems and practices toward liberation and transformation. We’ll share tools for helping leaders to demand, envision, and build more liberatory and racially just futures. We’ll raise up structural and organizational strategies for creating a new normal of moving from trauma to racial justice transformation in organizations, workplaces and networks. Together we can fight going “back to normal” using the greater strength of both vision and strategy to bend the arc of society to transformative futures.

Speakers: Kelly Bates, Miriam Messinger, Cynthia Silva Parker