NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, in collaboration with its sister organization, the Pro-Choice Massachusetts Foundation, is working to promote greater diversity on an organization-wide level, to form collaborations with communities of color, and to represent the needs of our diverse constituency more fully.

 

In brief, our efforts will employ a dual strategy of collaborating with organizations representing people of color and creating more diversity within our own organization. We propose to approach this in three phases, with each phase lasting approximately six to nine months. The first phase (which began in Spring 2007) includes an internal assessment of organizational diversity as it currently stands and gathering information about the unique reproductive justice issues that communities of color face. During the second phase, we will make programmatic changes that would better address the needs of our diverse constituencies. During the final phase, we will draw from the information we have learned and the relationships we have developed to improve our longstanding efforts to encourage people of color to become more active in the organization at the volunteer, committee, staff, and Board levels.

 

We are proud to have been awarded a $10,000 grant in Spring 2007 from Third Sector New England's Diversity Initiative after a very competitive process. To fully fund this effort, we need to raise additional money. The funds will be used to: support staff time to manage a diversity change effort for the organization, hire a professional facilitator to support our organization's diversity growth, and continue fundraising for this ongoing diversity effort.