PolicyLink was founded to realize a vision: Bring the wisdom, voices, experiences, and aspirations of those working for transformative change in local communities into the world of local, state, and federal policy. This ambition required engaging with people pursuing a variety of approaches to change across identities, issues, and geographies to build a massive multiracial movement for equity and justice.

It didn’t matter whether you came to the movement as an organizer, public interest lawyer, grassroots leader, philanthropist, community builder, community developer, service provider, or progressive scholar or researcher. Neither did it matter whether your area of focus was education, poverty, transportation, housing, health, economic development, or environmental justice. These approaches and issues are inextricably linked.

It also made no difference whether you came to PolicyLink as part of the Chicano movement, the Black Power movement, or movements for Indigenous communities, youth of color, LGBTQ+ rights, people with disabilities, immigrants, or any marginalized group. Our founding belief, which we have affirmed again and again over the years, is that all people wish to be visible, live in dignity, and exercise their voice and power to shape the future. Identity matters, of course, and the strategies, tactics, framing, and language of these movements vary. Yet at heart, they have all fought to overturn oppressive and exclusionary structures and systems. We have all insisted that this country deliver on the democratic promise that was never fulfilled: liberty, justice, and opportunity for all.

Activists and advocates working in silos and competing for attention and resources have found their power splintered, while leaders face limited capacity to achieve large-scale, sustained change. Imagine what could be accomplished, we thought, if leaders and groups strategized together, joined in transformative solidarity, and harnessed the power of united action.

National equity summits have expressed our founding vision. They have also served as markers of our collective journey toward equity while representing the evolution of PolicyLink. Each summit illuminates how our movement has grown in numbers, sophistication, power, and ambition. Summits offer forums for setting an agenda for collective action: clarifying goals, strengthening collaborations, and developing language and trust to talk about race and difference openly and honestly so we can move forward together.

PolicyLink was only three years old when we held our first summit in Los Angeles in 2002. Our first major foray onto the national stage was an experiment to see if people working across a spectrum of issues would come to our big tent. We focused on regional equity, framing the quest for fairness and inclusion in the context of geography. In short, when seeking equity, place matters. It turned out that activists in housing, health, food justice, economic development, and other issues not only could see themselves under that banner but also connected with and energized one another while discovering shared goals and opportunities for collaboration.

The theme of the second summit in Philadelphia in 2005 was equitable development. This convening translated the regional equity concept into action and focused on race. How do we center race (understanding past racial injustices and advancing equitable remedies) in the planning, decision-making, and investments that shape a region, whether in housing, transportation, or jobs? This summit put racial equity and equitable development on the national map and in the movement lexicon. It also generated examples and strategies for application.

A few months after the Philadelphia summit, the capacity of equitable development was tested when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Large influential foundations gathered around the concept of equitable development in an attempt to ensure a just rebuilding. To help inform and guide this effort, PolicyLink opened an office in Louisiana.

Understanding the headwinds that we face, we must drive toward creating a radically inclusive multiracial democracy that centers the humanity and dignity of us all.

In 2008, we held our summit in a city that laid bare, in heartbreaking and infuriating ways, exactly why race and place matter: New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had shown the world the catastrophic consequences of failed public infrastructure, underinvestment in Black neighborhoods, and the cruel disregard of public officials for the people who lived there.

By this time, PolicyLink had worked in the city for three years as it struggled to recover. That effort spurred us to expand our work into infrastructure. We asked: Who decides how the nation spends billions of dollars each year on water systems, transportation systems, climate mitigation, green spaces, housing, and everything else in the built environment? Who benefits from projects that support community resilience and thriving local economies? Who gets the jobs these projects create? For the first time, PolicyLink took aim at transforming not simply an issue, but also how entire fields operated.

These insights and challenges allowed us, in partnership with other groups working in the Gulf, to frame the 2008 New Orleans summit around infrastructure equity. The summit ended with a call and an agenda for infrastructure policy guided by participatory democracy and accountability for producing shared prosperity that benefits everyone, especially communities harmed and made vulnerable by racist policies and disinvestment.

The scale of public and private spending on infrastructure got us thinking more deeply about our economy. At our 2011 summit in Detroit, we presented a new frame: equity as an economic imperative. We argued that for an increasingly diverse nation seeking new paths to prosperity in a globalized world, equity is not only a moral call—the good, right thing to do—but also the superior growth model. Our research as well as work by others have demonstrated that inequity is a drag on our economy. (In 2019 alone, racial gaps in income and wealth cost the nation $3 trillion.)

Some of our friends and partners were skeptical about stretching the rationale for equity to the marketplace or tying equity to growth at a time when climate change and environmental degradation demanded an end to unrestrained growth. Yet we believed that equity as an economic imperative aligned with the imperative to protect the planet, and within a few short years, this dual agenda inspired and supported innovative strategies and important policy changes.

For example, private-public partnerships leveraged investments in affordable housing, grocery stores, green infrastructure, and resources for health and opportunity in disinvested neighborhoods around the country. Across the political spectrum, leaders in cities and states began raising their minimum wage, often with strong support from voters and business leaders. Organizing by coalitions of labor, community, and faith groups led to expanded workforce development, higher wages, stronger job protections, and safer working conditions in a range of industries and locales, from home-care workers in Washington state to construction workers in Texas and school food-service workers in Los Angeles.

Not only did such victories offer new models for creating an economy that works for everyone, but also they revealed two truths that would guide and expand the equity movement. First, equitable growth does not mean runaway development but a path to sustainability and healthy, robust communities.

Second, equity is not a zero-sum game that benefits one group at the expense of another. In targeting investments to the people and places that need them most, we strengthen and enrich our society. PolicyLink called this the curb-cut effect, underscoring the fact that equity is about creating a good life for all.

We reaffirmed these ideas at the 2015 summit in Los Angeles with the announcement of All-In Cities. This PolicyLink initiative seized on the resurgence of US cities and their potential for innovation using a framework and policy agenda aimed at ensuring a fully inclusive urban comeback that nurtured the talents and tapped the skills of everyone, especially low-income people and people of color who had lived in cities through their long decline.

By that time, our networks were far from the only ones talking about equity. The nation had elected the most diverse political leaders in history at all levels of government, a dramatic indication of the power of an emerging people-of-color majority. Companies, municipal agencies, old-line NGOs—everyone, it seemed—introduced “DEI” initiatives. While we celebrated this progress, we recognized that diverse representation in politics, business, and civil society is critical but not sufficient for driving the transformative change needed to create an equitable future. The concept of equity had become so ubiquitous that it risked losing all meaning.

That’s why we released The Equity Manifesto at the 2015 Los Angeles summit. It reasserted the definition of equity—just and fair inclusion into a society in which everyone can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential—and defined the underlying values of a multiracial movement with the aim of unlocking the promise of the nation by unleashing the promise in us all.

The Chicago 2018 summit found the country in a decidedly different political environment. Hard-won civil rights, fundamental democratic values, and the very notion of equity had come under assault. Leaders at the highest echelons of the federal government seethed with overt racial animus. Rather than retrench, PolicyLink embraced radical imagination and issued our most audacious, far-reaching declaration yet.

We called the summit “Our Power. Our Future. Our Nation.” This was our way of saying that we were no longer asking for a seat at the table. Instead, we were the table. The equity movement had grown to include a huge cohort of leaders from every sector imaginable, including government, business, media, the arts, technology, big philanthropy, and legions of nonprofits. It cuts across race, ethnicity, gender, generation, religion, ability, and every other line that is used to divide and disempower us. Together, we intend to create a new nation that finally fulfills the ideals and promises spelled out in the country’s founding documents.

It was also at this summit, following 20 years at the helm of PolicyLink, that I announced I would step into a new PolicyLink role of founder-in-residence, and Michael McAfee would become CEO.

Six years have passed since then. We endured COVID-19. An insurrection at the US Capitol. Supreme Court decisions that have set back human rights and freedoms by a half century. We have discovered just how fragile our democracy is.

The equity movement faces furious pushback. As victories are ripped away and issues of fairness and justice we thought were settled have come under vicious attack, the trust and partnerships we have built over the years will be tested. Together, we must hold on to everything we’ve learned, stick to our ground, and keep pushing forward. This perilous moment affirms what the movement has said all along: A threat to the most vulnerable is a threat to all.

It is at this moment that we gather in Atlanta for a summit called, “A Revolution of the Soul.” Understanding the headwinds that we face, we must drive toward creating a radically inclusive multiracial democracy that centers the humanity and dignity of us all. Together, movement partners can reflect on the individual and collective work needed to deliver on the ultimate aspiration of equity: building a nation where everyone can thrive.

We know that the big tent we envisioned years ago is precisely what the nation needs at this historic juncture. Thanks to the work of thousands of organizations and institutions and millions of constituents, an intersectional movement, guided by radical imagination and working in the spirit of generosity, stands ready to not only protect our democracy but also transform it to serve human flourishing for all.