Forging Pathways to a Just Future.

Amaya Gaines, Ph.D student at Cornell and a 2025–2026 Racial Justice Student Fellow at the Center, co-published a new post for the North Carolina Budget & Tax Center. The researchers explain how H.R. 1, the federal megabill passed in 2025 making sweeping cuts to SNAP benefits, will require states to provide a share of the costs. North Carolina must raise and sustain enough revenue to cover their share—otherwise, residents run a significant risk of food inscurity and hunger, which disproportionately affect Black and Latine communities. Read more at the link about the bill, how it is affecting North Carolina in particular, and what the risks and solutions may be.

State level Child Tax Credits (CTCs) are an important policy tool for reducing child poverty. But not all CTC policy is created equally. As states have increasingly adopted their own CTCs, they have taken remarkably different approaches to policy design. The choices states make about how to design CTC policy have stark implications for how powerful CTCs are as levers for advancing racial and economic equity. Drawing on an original database of every state CTC bill introduced between 2018 and 2024, Jamila Michener, director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, and co-authors Sarah D. Rozenblum, Natália de Paula Moreira, and Amaya M. Gaines develop a new framework for systematically assessing the equitability of CTC policy design. They show that while some states have embraced equity-enhancing policy features—such as full refundability, higher benefit amounts, and reduced administrative burdens—many others have adopted policy designs that are likely to reproduce existing racial and economic hierarchies. Most broadly, this paper considers what it means to design public policy equitably, and how we can measure (in)equitable designs systematically. These are questions we must continually ask and answer if we are to build policies that support just and equitable outcomes for all denizens.

Futures Forum is the Center’s multi-modal platform for collectively dreaming, imagining, and building more just and equitable futures. You can now get all of our podcasts on Apple, Spotify, I Heart Radio, Podbean, and more. We invite you to listen—or return—to the incredible guests we’ve spoken with since starting Futures Forum earlier this year. Subscribe on your favorite platform to get all new episodes delivered automatically. Our past and upcoming guests are brilliant and nuanced thinkers, writers, and organizers who you won’t want to miss!

The Healthy Project podcast recently featured Neil Lewis Jr. and Sarah Gollust, researchers with the Collaborative on Media and Messaging for Health and Social Policy (COMM), to discuss health inequity, the imperative for effective public health messaging, and communication strategies to help mitigate health disparities.

Grace Beals, a graduate research assistant at the Center and part of our inaugural cohort of student fellows in 2024–25; Marissa Rivera, a recipient of a 2025–26 graduate student research grant; and Jamila Michener, director at the Center, find that states have largely been advancing expansionary Medicaid policy, and, crucially, that when states propose Medicaid policy specifically related to advancing equity, those policies are as likely to pass as other non-equity related policy. This means that equity-focused policy is no more politically infeasible than other kinds of policy.

In a new report, Yusra Murad, a researcher and organizer, and Jamila Michener, director of the Center, show how the tenant organizing movement is building collective power among tenants and disrupting assumptions about the racial wealth gap by shifting narratives to decouple property ownership and power.