Acknowledgements

We thank Shirley Strong at Project Change for the idea and original seed money to get this website started, along with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Network of Alliances Bridging Race and Ethnicity (NABRE) program, which contributed Maggie Potapchuk’s time when we began this work and provided other initial staffing support. We would also like to thank Susan Batten at the Annie E. Casey Foundation who allowed us to use a portion of a grant from AECF to support CAPD’s early work on the website. We are deeply indebted as well to Kimberly Roberson at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation who provided the bulk of the funding necessary to take this website from its early stage to a more fully developed resource over the past two years. All of these people – Shirley, Susan, and Kimberly – also provided important guidance and encouragement along the way.

We are very grateful to the four organizations that agreed to pilot the website. Each organization provided us candid feedback, shared their ideas and expectations for the website, helped create its framework, piloted tools and resources, and served as our advisors along the way. We thank especially Elaine Gross at ERASE Racism on Long Island, New York; Frankie Blackburn and Ray Moreno of IMPACT Silver Spring in Maryland; Marisabel Villagomez, Doris Watkins, and Jill Weiler from Tellin’ Stories in Washington, D.C. and Barbara Heisler Williams and George Robinson of the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race in New Jersey. Please take the time to read more about them and check out their websites.

We especially appreciate the generosity of all the organizations who are sharing their tools and resources on this website. We hope you will visit their websites to see more.

We also thank Kien Lee, Association for the Study and Development of Community (www.capablecommunity.com) and Ruben Lizardo, California Tomorrow (www.californiatomorrow.org) who critiqued the evaluation process, provided ideas on how to shape the website content and shared many of their organizations’ materials.

Finally, we want to acknowledge the key contributions of the website designer – Terri O’Connor of Carrottop Creative (carrottopcreative@earthlink.net), as well as Matthew Leiderman and Dale Rohrbaugh, consultants who did much of the background work and proofread the entire website. We could never have completed this project without their very welcome advice and excellent work.

Thanks to each of them.

Sally Leiderman and Sam Stephens, Center for Assessment and Policy Development
Maggie Potapchuk, MP Associates, Inc.
December 21, 2004