By Cecilia Olusola Tribble
Cecilia Olusola Tribble is the GARE Director of Innovative Practice. In 2023, Ms. Tribble convened the inaugural GARE Southern Innovation Community, which brought together 14 practitioners across the South. The cadre met monthly, participating in readings, viewings and discussion groups to surface key insights as they embedded the GARE approach in their work. They built peer relationships while reflecting on the often-uphill battle of institutionalizing racial equity work in difficult political climates. Their work together culminated in the New Southern Strategies Playbook, a comprehensive guide for advancing racial equity in government in the South and beyond.
Read an overview of the playbook here. GARE members can access the full playbook in the GARE Online Community.
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“Closed minded folks, but don’t nobody wanna hear it… but the South got something to say! ”
-Andre 3000, 1995 Source Awards
The inaugural GARE Innovation Community cadre gathered experienced racial equity practitioners who hold positions of varying levels in local government from the southern United States to build community and co-create innovative equity content and practices to share with the field in 2023. These innovators live and work in a region shaped by a history of cultural and political strategies designed to exclude people of color - Black Americans in particular - and they are actively grappling with what it means to advance racial equity in that landscape.
When faced with the questions, “What does the field of equity in government need?” and “What tool does this body want to co-create?” - the response was: Let’s co-create something that helps practitioners make meaning with what they already have at their fingertips. Let’s create something that helps to fill the gap between what we say and what we practice. The gap is bridged by the stories of equity practitioners - stories that reveal the mechanics of how they build relationships in community to drive equity in local government.
The cadre wanted to produce a resource that could make other equity practitioners’ lives and work a little easier, to pass on wisdom and work from their practices... to produce a book of plays, if you will. The title, New Southern Strategies, speaks to the context in which they are doing their work, referencing the backlash that followed the gains of the Civil Rights Movement - namely Black enfranchisement through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The original “Southern Strategy” of the 1970s used dog whistle politics to mobilize white voters against their own social and economic interests. Its legacy lives on in today’s racist and xenophobic policies, supermajority statehouses, and governorships across the South. Here in the South, Tennessee lawmakers expelled two young Black legislators for speaking out against gun violence on behalf of their communities after a Nashville school shooting in 2023 - one example among many of how the past continues to echo loudly in the present. Here in the South, migrants are criminalized, books are banned, and racism is no longer whispered. The dog whistles are gone.
New Southern Strategies is a playbook that underscores that when we visualize, normalize, organize, and operationalize – when we practice the GARE Approach - we can win. These plays are not “one size fits all,” rather they are meant to inspire, support fundamental practice, and make space for experimentation so practitioners can drive equity in ways that respond to the specific contexts and needs of their jurisdictions.
As the cadre forged and grew our relationships with one another, three things emerged:
1. Learning forward and taking wins happen even when you lose a battle;
2. We need each other’s knowledge, experience, and love; and
3. Doing racial equity work in government absolutely matters.
If we are to take GARE’s mission seriously, we need all of these elements to move us toward connection that catalyzes systemic change across local governments. Here in the South, in Florida, we visualize and normalize equity through building relationships. Here in the South, in Texas, we are yet rising by using library cards as a pathway for undocumented immigrants to gain access to having identification. It is here in the South, in North Carolina, that we utilize ARPA funding to house and feed those affected by COVID and natural disasters. Here all over the South, we have yet to manifest democratic practice.
The contributing practitioners are from states where democracy seems to be the most fragile. But, in fact, our democracy is imperiled nationwide because of a collectively anemic and atrophied imagination that pushes us toward authoritarianism and exclusion. Shoring up democracy requires imagining a not-yet and making the not-yet manifest. This requires a kind of hope that edges toward the future… a promise.
The work of racial equity in government requires imagination, hope, and innovation. The inaugural Innovation Community cadre defines innovative practice in the following ways: Innovative practice is decolonizing our imaginations toward democratic practice in our jurisdictions and in community with one another. Innovative practice is rooted in historical and current sociopolitical contexts. Innovative practice sometimes means practicing the fundamentals and shaping them anew. Innovative practice is creative, collaborative – moving at the speed of trust so we can build a durable, sustainable freedom. To quote the great Black thinker, W.E.B. Dubois from The Souls of Black Folk:
“Freedom […], the long sought, we still seek, - the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, - all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding, each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before [us], the idea of brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of the [Human] Race; […] the greater ideals of the American Republic […] we […] come now not-altogether empty handed…” 7
So, we offer these gifts, a playbook. These are the gift and grace of story, method, and practice told through the major tenets of the GARE Approach - visualize, normalize, organize, and operationalize. Our aim is to make you a believer; that change in the South can happen and is happening. Our aim is to encourage the equity field in the South, particularly, and everyone, especially, because we are all living in paths overdetermined by white supremacy. We are all dealing with the consequences of multiple administrations and policies that reinforce racism at every level of government. Our aim is to show what works in these local governments so you can practice the fundamentals with us and explore new, innovative approaches in your own work. We invite you to be a witness to these testimonies of trials and triumph, work and wisdom, imagination and innovation. We offer you the gifts of possibilities and promise of the South rising anew with strategies in hand working toward our collective transformation and freedom.