Coming Together: Are we making a difference?

Coming Together for Racial Understanding is a top-down national-wide effort to strengthen Cooperative Extension’s capacity to work with communities seeking to resolve racial tensions and to promote racial healing within the Cooperative Extension System. Our evaluation work has played a key role in helping organizers for the Coming Together initiative understand how the theory of change underlying that approach plays out in the lives and work of participants. Rather than mandating training and focusing on policy, this initiative seeks to make change by supporting bottom-up dialog-to-change conversations. Using Ripple Effects Mapping, the research team was able to track how small changes emerging from these conversations have rippled out to create change in personal and interpersonal actions and behaviors leading to emergent changes the culture of the institution and in institutional practice and policy. The mapping process and results highlight how small changes can begin to effect changes in institutions and structural racism by changing mental models regarding structural racism. In keeping with iceberg model for system change, this evaluation process concludes that this particular combination of top-down and bottom-up efforts show promise in facilitate systems change and addressing structural racism, particularly as it is embedded in everyday practice.