About The Praxis Project

About The Praxis Project

The Praxis Project is a national intermediary that supports the efforts of communities of color to build power, mobilize grassroots stakeholders, and leverage local policy to redefine the places where we live and how we participate in the governance of our communities. Our model flows from the Praxis vision. It integrates an explicit commitment to equity, and aims to move beyond solving problems to defining the strategies required to address fundamental dynamics of structural racism and inequity in order to transform our communities into places that allows us to thrive and collectively determine our health and prosperity. Specifically, we are promoting an emerging model of fulcrum points, allowing for comprehensive social change solutions that build democracy and governance, address problems and needs, and deliver just outcomes. The Belmont Meeting illustrates how Praxis seeks to elevate conversations about public policy by creating spaces that link reflection, analysis and advocacy as necessary elements of a progressive policy model.

Our Policy Approach

What are the building blocks of a new democracy? How will we learn to work together? Govern together? Working locally, we can more effectively make our voices heard, forge shared vision and even implement cutting edge initiatives. The local is especially important as our communities are often concentrated in urban and rural areas that are marginalized in the regular course of state and federal policymaking. As statewide initiatives tend to focus where legislative interest and power resides, these initiatives can contribute to the disenfranchisement of cities and rural areas and further privilege suburban areas. Building local power with national vision and coordination is building democracy from the bottom up. Praxis is committed to building local power with a long term view toward real change. We are promoting an emerging model of fulcrum points, allowing for comprehensive social change solutions that build democracy and governance, address problems and needs, and deliver just outcomes.Not just more policy but better policy. Inspired by theoretical frameworks like Lefebvre’s “Right to the City,” Sembello, Freire and Cabral, we have been grappling with how our work concretely contributes to real change. Good policy cuts across at least three themes (described above) which we have translated into a three-stage ranking approach to our policy work.

You can find more examples in our Model Policy Database, which has an array of local policy reflecting our fulcrum points and three-stage ranking approach.