Open Society Foundations Announce 2018 Soros Equality Fellows
Artists, advocates, journalists, health care professionals, filmmakers, and organizers. The 2018 class of Soros Equality Fellows come from diverse backgrounds, and work across a wide variety of fields. But they share in common a commitment to racial justice, ideas for moving the country forward on issues that deeply divide us in this fractured age, and the desire to lead.
The 12 fellows, the second cohort named since the fellowship program’s launch in 2017, come from all over the country, as well as Brazil, and represent a range of ethnic and racial communities. Their projects bring a vast array of tools to the challenge of advancing racial justice: from an effort to build transcontinental coalitions against anti-black bias to trainings for Muslim communities coping with surveillance and profiling to holding financial institutions accountable for upholding the rights of indigenous peoples to connecting diverse African immigrants’ experiences through the power of song, among others.
The program is intended to help incubate innovators and risk-takers striving to create and develop new ways of addressing the challenges of racial disparity and discrimination in the United States. Beyond nurturing their specific projects, the program seeks to promote leadership development training, networking, and other professional support aimed at building a pipeline connecting the energy and ideas of youth with the wisdom and influence of experience...