The O’Connor Project confronts the challenge issued by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion affirming the constitutionality of the University of Michigan’s diversity admissions policies. Its goal is to advance research-based policies and practices that will help to improve educational outcomes for children of color during the next decade.

In particular, we will measure, raise awareness of, and help to develop strategies to address the “opportunity gap”—or the social inequalities outside of schools that prevent many children of color from academically achieving at the levels of their white peers. These exceedingly complex social conditions help determine a child’s mood, health, behavior, motivation to learn, ability to focus, self-concept and social and institutional relationships. Yet too often policies are enacted as if schools existed in a vacuum, and children were not influenced by their experiences outside the classroom.

 Launched in November, 2011, One Nation Indivisible harnesses the power of storytelling and strategic organizing to empower people struggling to create, sustain and improve racially, culturally and linguistically integrated schools, communities, workplaces and social institutions.

Pathways Home works to mobilize the array of resources formerly incarcerated people need to rebuild their lives. We encourage and develop partnerships among service providers, the business community, law enforcement, grassroots organizers, faith-based leaders, academic institutions, training/employment programs and other appropriate allies.

The current judicial and punishment system is failing individuals, communities and the nation. Over 2.2 million people are now locked behind bars, a crisis of mass incarceration that disproportionately affects communities of color. The financial cost, estimated at over 60 billion dollars a year, and the incalculable human cost of our revolving law enforcement system are staggering. They represent two defining features of a penal crisis unprecedented in world history.

There is a long and direct connection between racial politics in the United States and the state-sanctioned executions of African Americans. From the racial profiling that occurs before arrest, to a prosecutor’s decision about whether to seek the death penalty, to the racially-tinged selection of jurors, to the decision about whether to impose the death penalty, opportunities for prejudice to infect the system abound.