Prioritizing anti-racism practices in our camps and schools is essential to ensuring all children feel safe and accepted. Below, Blueprint4 has gathered various articles, reports, and books from local and national organizations to help you make camps welcoming spaces and how to teach kids about racism and anti-racism.

Fall 2020 Camp Summit – Anti-Racism Workshop Part 1

Anti-Racism in Summer Camps

Anti-Racism in Summer Camp Part 2

Transformational Capacity Building – Stanford Social Innovation Review

Local Organizations

• EyeSeeMe: Eye See Me, the African American Children’s Bookstore, has a mission to be a resource to parents, teachers, and schools in providing the very best children’s books on the market that promote positive images and stories about African American culture and history.
• Forward Through Ferguson: Forward Through Ferguson (FTF) was established as a 501(c)3 to be a catalyst for lasting positive change in the St. Louis region as outlined in the Ferguson Commission Report. The Report describes ways in which individuals can learn more, act, voice support or dissent, and to find ways to advance the goal of racial equality within our community.
• Gladiator Consulting LLC: Gladiator Consulting works with organizations nonprofit and government organizations locally, nationally, and globally to reimagine planning, strategy, and fund development with a specific focus on promoting equity, justice, and belonging within these organizations.

Articles & Web Resources

• Great Mondays: Great Mondays’ Culture Classroom provides organization leaders with resources to help them build a positive work culture. Great Mondays provides online courses and quick-start worksheets to help companies create positive values and behaviors, leading employees to love their jobs.
• Antiracism In Summer Camp: This is the first in a series of articles written by Travis Allison on action steps that camps can take to dismantle racism. The rest of Travis Allison’s series on Anti-Racism and Summer Camp is found at the bottom of this introductory article.
• Don’t Talk about Implicit Bias Without Talking about Structural Racism: This article, published by the National Equity Project, discusses how individuals, especially those in leadership positions, must examine, unpack, and mitigate their own biases and dismantle the structures that hold inequity in place.
• The Summer Camp Society – Black Lives Matter: This blog post examines why camps, especially overnight camps, have remained a primarily white institutions and the ways that camps must overcome this by being actively anti-racist.
• PBS Tools for Anti-Racist Teaching: This four-part series created by PBS Teachers Lounge explores tools for anti-racist teaching and will consider the ways in which we can use media and media literacy to deepen understanding of systemic racism. Recordings of the webinars on each of the four topics are available on this website.
• PBS Talking to Kids about Racism: This website, created by PBS Kids for Parents, provides parents and guardians with tips and resources to help them have meaningful conversations with young children about race, racism, and being anti-racist.
• A Padlet of Anti-Racism Resources for Kids of All Ages: This website is a compilation of over 200 resources, including recommended books, articles, and reports, aimed to encourage people and families to learn more about systematic racism and becomming an anti-racist.
• PBS Learning Media: Race, Racism, Protests, Current Events, Etc.: PBS Learning has compiled a non-exhaustive list of educational materials to help teach middle and high school students about the history of race and racism in America.
• Anti-Racism Videos for Kids: Chicago Parent has gathered various anti-racism videos for parents, guardians, or other caretakers to watch with thier children.
• Marketing and Recruiting Campers of Color: In this article, Travis Allison explains how to market and recruit campers of color in a respectful manner in order to improve diversity in camps while also continuing to promote anti-racism at summer camps.
• Anti-Racism Resources for White Educators: The resources on this website follow a long line of imagining fresh approaches to teaching, learning, and creating liberatory futures. These approaches include, but are not limited to, freedom dreaming, futures thinking, visioning and liberatory design.
• Trying Together: Anti-Racism Tools: Trying Together has created a non-exhaustive list of anti-racism resources for parents, educators, and children to support anti-racist education and work.
• Breaking the Cycle of Silence around Black Mental Health: This article examines the reasons why Black youth are especially prone to develop mental health issues and how teachers, schools, and parents can help support the emotional and mental well-being of children.

Books about Race and Racism

• Black Faces, White Spaces: Drawing on a variety of sources and analyzing different historical moments, including the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Carolyn Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America
• How to be an Anti-Racist: In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Paulo Freire’s work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world, taking on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing.
• Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: Through this work, Dr. DeGruy encourages readers to view their attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors through the lens of history and so gain a greater understanding of the impact centuries of slavery and oppression has had on African Americans
• Stamped from the Beginning: In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
• White Fragility: In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what people can do to engage more constructively.
• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues in this book that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.