Systems Analysis for Revitalization
Community-based participatory research reveals five key sectors that need attention in order to improve the lives of African Americans in San Francisco: housing, jobs, education, health and criminal justice. The Institute will first focus on the three interrelated sectors of housing, jobs and education.
These three key/core factors are interrelated. Strength or weakness in any one impacts the others. Education may be the super-power element of the three, but racial prejudice in jobs and housing has long term economic and wealth impacts that can feed back into educational opportunity.
Why do it?
All of this exists within a historical, moral, and spiritual context in which it is given meaning. The moral and spiritual energizes actions.
Ecosystem Based Thinking
Ecosystem thinking underscores the necessity of understanding and linking related parts in order to produce a sustainable whole. In other words, we must engage the business, civic, political and social components of the entire community across the historic and current realities impacting such sectors as housing, jobs, education and more. Wisdom says: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”