Book Talk: Before Gentrification, with Tanya Golash-Boza

Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza's book Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap explores how redlining, incarceration, anti-blackness, and gentrification have resulted in DC becoming an extremely unequal city. She presented her book...

Advancing Equitable Community-based Transportation Planning

In response to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reducing transportation inequities, the California Air Resources Board launched two clean mobility grant programs that fund community transportation needs assessments, planning, and...

The Future of Spirituality and Belonging, with john a. powell

On January, 23, 2024, Director john. a. powell sat down with Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp and Reverend Ben McBride to discuss the future of spirituality, belonging, memory, and the relationship between structure and story. Listen to the two-part...

The Shadow Constitution

Download article. The United States Constitution is the foundation of American law and one of the most venerated documents in the American political community. Although most constitutional scholarship focuses on the meaning of the more heavily...

Migration Policy

In late 2023, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell forecasted that 2024 would be the year of fear. Borrell expressed his concern that Europeans’ fears would lead them to elect the far right en masse. In that respect, he is probably...

The Children of the Minotaur

Opening Thoughts Facing the fierce winds of climate chaos, of growing geopolitical instabilities around the world, of declining trust in democratic institutions, and of pandemic futures replete with bacterial agents and viral thresholds, it is...

Bridging & Belonging Through Community Action

OBI Director john a. powell gave the keynote address at the National Community Action Partner Annual Conference on February 14, 2024. This year's conference marked the 60th Anniversary of the Economic Opportunity Act that launched the Community...

End gender-based violence by standing with Indigenous communities

The colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples in what is now called California included the state-funded genocide of 90 percent of Indigenous populations and the accumulation of land and wealth among white settlers. According to Dr. Cutcha Risling...

Housing Insecurity and Policy Views in Orange County, CA

This brief summarizes findings from our survey research with Orange County residents on their experiences of housing insecurity, and housing policy views.

California renews adoption of OBI opportunity map

BERKELEY: The California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (CTCAC) has reapproved the use of an opportunity map developed by the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) and its partners, California Housing Partnership and the Terner Center for Housing...

Podcast: To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul

In this episode Director john. a. powell talked to Tracy K. Smith about her new book, To Free the Captives. powell and Smith discussed Smith's term as a Poet Laureate for the United States and how she has used poetry to create feelings of belonging...

Daring to Dream

The year 2023 has been full of violence. The ongoing killing and injury of tens of thousands of non-combatants and especially of children in Gaza, at the hands of the Israeli military, defies imagination. Russia's war on Ukraine continues unabated...

OBI University

Take free classes with us on our new learning platform to learn about structural marginalization and the processes of othering, and the building blocks of belonging. OBI University is also home to the 2023 O&B Conference Archive.

Principles for Reframing the National Security Narrative

Our public discourse is seeded with dangerous and counterproductive ideas concerning national security that are so deeply embedded we may often be unaware that we, as story tellers, are invoking or reinforcing them in our own narrations. Thus, over...

Video: Disability & Blackness

One of the hidden aspects of the Black Panther Party in the California Bay Area was its contributions to the nascent disability rights movement in the 1970s. In 1977, the Party famously supported a 26-day occupation of a federal building in San...

Explore Othering and Belonging

Book Talk: Before Gentrification, with Tanya Golash-Boza

Dr. Tanya Golash-Boza's book Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap explores how redlining, incarceration, anti-blackness, and gentrification have resulted in DC becoming an extremely unequal city. She presented her book...
Apr
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Reimagining Urban Planning: State of The Practice

Register here Reimagining Planning is a monthly series of public webinars that focuses on the edge of innovation in urban planning and policy. Traditionally Urban Planning has had a long legacy of harming communities of color, developing and implementing racist...

Advancing Equitable Community-based Transportation Planning

In response to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while reducing transportation inequities, the California Air Resources Board launched two clean mobility grant programs that fund community transportation needs assessments, planning, and...