Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing (MICAH) is a partner organization of the Minnesota Senior Federation and recently spearheaded an Anti-racism Team. MnSF affordable housing committee member and housing VISTA Jackie Stewart and committee member Shirley Kulevsky were among those named to the team.

The team, working with the Minnesota Collaborative Anti-Racism Initiative will:

• focus on defining racism
• examine how systemic power manifests through racism to disempowered people of color
• examine the synergy and structure of systems and institutions
• examine the history of racism that has shaped institutions
• introduce a framework for assessing and recognizing institutional practices that produce unintentional racial outcomes
• explore approaches to anti-racist institutional transformation
• introduce tools for institutional assessment and historical research.

The next phase of their work will be an audit of MICAH's history. Their tasks will include conversations with stakeholders to research institutional history in relation to the impact of racism, and current institutional assessment in relation to power, The privilege and advantage of the majority in a democratic society, and institutional relationship mapping.

The outcome of the Anti-racism Team's initial work includes building the capacity of MICAH to work in partnership with communities of color in addressing housing policy in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. MICAH will use the anti-racism lens to select policy campaigns that will be of benefit especially to communities of color, American Indians and immigrants who are the most deeply affected by the housing crisis. In one of the most racially and economically segregated metropolitan areas in the country, institutional racism is a barrier to building affordable housing.

Pat Lamb, a member of the team and a member of MICAH's Organizing Project of African American Congregations, said: "They needed some color at these meetings. Now that this region is so diverse we must realize you can't solve the housing crisis if you're ignoring racism. Race isn't about black and white. Race is about economics, income and power." For more information on MICAH's work, call  612/871-8980.