Over the last few years, Prosperity Now has increasingly focused on developing and strengthening its approach to addressing racial economic inequality and advancing racial wealth equity. In 2015, we launched the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative to integrate a racial economic equity lens, framework and analysis to focus our work and bring expertise to this issue.

As the asset-building field works to better understand and address how the racial wealth divide and racial economic inequality affect asset development and economic security, we realized that due to the lessons we’ve learned and emerging promising practices we’ve identified, we have an opportunity to provide guidance on proper grammar and suggested choice of terms to help people committed to this cause more effectively communicate on racial economic equity.

As our work has grown, we also saw value in adding sections to provide design guidelines on visually depicting diverse communities, and definitions of important terms and concepts for understanding the nuance and complexity of racial economic equity, the racial wealth divide, and racial wealth equity. This document is a compilation of best practices and recommendations from a wide range of resources that Prosperity Now’s Racial Wealth Divide Initiative (RWDI) and Communications teams thought would be helpful for naming, framing, defining and understanding the issue.

While this guide was first published for internal use in 2017, we have since recognized that the field, our partners, the communities we serve and the funders we work with could also find it useful. Now, it is available as a resource for anyone committed to developing best practices to communicate about and address the racial wealth divide and advance racial economic equity. 

Read the report