Opportunity increasingly depends on who can access education, technology, capital, healthcare, and institutions. Access Shift explores the barriers and breakthroughs defining economic and social mobility.
Corporate leaders have spent several years hearing a blunt warning: support diversity, equity and inclusion and risk losing customers, investors and revenue. The warning has animated executive decisions across American business. Google, Walmart, McDonald’s and other major employers have revised diversity initiatives as legal challenges and political scrutiny intensified. The threat has seemed concrete and…
Two former Golden State Warriors front-office employees have sued the organization, alleging racial and gender discrimination, workplace harassment and retaliation. One of the plaintiffs previously served as the franchise’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion—placing the team’s internal culture at the center of a public legal dispute that raises uncomfortable questions about how organizations…
For six decades, the federal government has required large employers to disclose who works for them and where those employees sit within the organizational hierarchy. Now, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is proposing to eliminate that requirement—potentially making workplace discrimination significantly harder to detect and nearly impossible to prove at scale. The EEOC voted 2–1…
For most of the last two decades, the American labor market told Black families a story simple enough to organize a life around: get the degree, and the odds improve. That story is now under revision, and the revision is being reported as good news. The Wall Street Journal, drawing on a new analysis from…
A proposed Treasury rule would tie federal tax exemption to how private schools treat race. The mechanism is the story: not a prohibition, but a price. The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service proposed a regulation Thursday that would deny or revoke 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for private educational institutions that adopt, maintain or enforce…
Federal cuts to TRIO programs removed counselors, campus visits and financial-aid guidance from thousands of students who were already least likely to reach college. Access Shift In Del Norte County, the nearest community college is nearly two hours away. For years, the students there who were most likely to be first in their families to…
Rhode Island has banned a practice that let large grocers leave a neighborhood and keep another supermarket from replacing them. Access Shift Woonsocket, Rhode Island, has roughly 45,000 residents and one full-service supermarket. Thirty-seven percent of residents are food insecure and 18 percent have no access to a vehicle. It reads as a familiar American…
Police in North Carolina say everything is on the table in the death of Demetrius Fleming. In a country where the image of a Black body hanging carries its own history, that is the minimum responsible posture — and it comes with obligations that outlast the investigation. Demetrius Eugene Fleming was 38, a father of…
Foundations are putting new money behind education, mental health, fatherhood and economic mobility for boys and men. Whether they are building institutions or funding another moment is a question the sector already has an answer to. Drew Lindsay reported for The Chronicle of Philanthropy on August 20 that a field once considered awkward terrain for mainstream philanthropy is…
A Temple historian’s new book argues that America’s fights over equality have often ended at the same place: the bathroom door. Bryant Simon, Laura H. Carnell Professor of History at Temple University, has written For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, scheduled for release Sept. 8 by the University of Chicago…