The Center for Community Change and the Perception Institute has the goal of understanding how African American and Latino communities speak with and about each other in order to find commonalities and develop messages that resonate and unite both communities to build transformative social justice movements for progressive change. We hope that these conversations give people a space to be open about:

1) the preconceived notions, biases, or stereotypes we may have about each other;

2) shared experiences of recent oppression or discrimination in Chicago;

3) commonalities of history or our communities that people may not always think about. The push/pull dynamic that both Black people historically (the Great Migration from the South during Jim Crow based upon hopes of better jobs and less discrimination) and many new immigrant communities today that led people to Chicago. Understanding what keeps us apart as well as ways that better understand how we are alike and can come together will be instrumental to developing content and messages for further testing in the second phase of research, an online survey.