Centering Change Skills Hub

Building Leadership Capacity to Address Race and Bias in the Massachusetts Trial Courts

CISC is working with the leadership of the Massachusetts Trial Court to implement a set of evidence-based engagement strategies that enable leadership and employees throughout MTC to address race and bias, while increasing public trust and confidence and building a culture that supports effective, respectful, and accountable interactions. The project has four key components: 

  1. Building the capacity of strategically placed leadership cohorts to address race and bias, and to equip others to do the same, through leadership workshops and individualized support. 
  2. Working with these strategically located leadership cohorts, enabling MTC leadership to implement court and community-based workshops, dialogues, and policies designed to build cultures in which employees engage effectively with each other and with court users around race and bias; 
  3. Developing an infrastructure of continuous learning through data collection, assessment, reflection, and dissemination processes that build capacity to address race and bias throughout MTC; and 
  4. Creating and disseminating a Leadership Capacity Building Guidebook for facilitators conducting workshops and sessions aimed at building the capacity to address race, gender, and bias. That guidebook will be completed in the Summer of 2020.

Susan Sturm, the Center's Director, is the Principal Investigator on this project.