Last week, the White House Council on Women and Girls teamed up with the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University to host a conference at the White House. The conference was named “Advancing Equity for Women & Girls of Color: A Research Agenda for the Next Decade.”
According to The Grio, the purpose of the meeting was to put "together academics and people from the private, government and philanthropic worlds [to] focus on strategies to create more opportunities for people, especially women and girls of color, and to remove obstacles to success." Some of the different issues that were addressed at the meeting were "economic development, healthcare, criminal justice, vulnerability …show more content…
The Collaborative to Advance Equity through Research put another $18 million on the table. This group wants "to promote research on women and girls of color."
The specifics of how the money would be used was not given, but Valerie Jarrett, Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, said that a vision for the future would be created under the hashtag #YesSheCan initiative. “I’ve often said the talent is ubiquitous. But opportunity is not. We need to think of every child as our child, and every girl as our girl," she added.
One focus of the research is more research. Professor and Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University, Melissa Harris-Perry, told The Grio that “without the foundation of research, we can’t know how to make you [see the] need for interventions in the lives of women and girls of color in a way that ensures that we are advancing equity.” Put another way, if you have a bad shoulder it doesn't matter how much money you put into fixing the knee, the shoulder is still bad. Without good data putting the money into the right places, the problems are not going to be