The Thurgood Marshall College Fund in January 2017 announced a bold new partnership with the Charles Koch Foundation to use data-driven analytics to study the problems of “fragile communities” in the United States. With the help of the Gallup Poll, findings of the consortium’s initial study were released this week in Washington, D.C. during its first national conference.
Some key findings focused on so-called fragile-community residents, who were nearly three times as likely as Americans overall to say there were times in the past year when they didn’t have enough money to pay for food for themselves or their families. Evidencing a relationship between race and poverty, about two-thirds of residents in such communities identified as Black (37 percent) or Hispanic (29 percent).
And in the category of quality of life, residents in fragile communities gave their lives a rating of 6.07 on a zero-to-10 scale (with 10 the highest quality). According to the Gallup Poll, the rating for Americans as a whole was 7.05.
The partnership between the TMCF and Koch spawned an ambitious organization called the Center for Advancing Opportunity, which serves as the fulcrum for the research initiative. The center defines fragile communities as areas in the United States characterized by high proportions of residents struggling in their daily lives and possessing limited opportunities for social mobility.
“We, as the HBCU community, have to solve some of our most vexing problems,” Johnny C. Taylor Jr., who negotiated the deal with the Charles Koch Foundation last year, said during a panel discussion Monday morning. “We shouldn’t have to always reach out to Harvard or Duke University or the University of Chicago for studies and solutions. We, in the HBCU community, know our problems.
“We are beginning to get evidence-based, data-based solutions to some of our problems, whether they are in Black communities or Brown communities or White communities or Yellow communities. Remember, some of our HBCUs are in predominantly White areas with a high concentration of Republicans. Either way, they are fragile communities – and American communities.”
TMCF represents 47 public HBCUs around the nation.
