The University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE) is dedicated to helping the University of Virginia and the Charlottesville communities work together to understand the University’s role in slavery, racial segregation, and discrimination and to find ways to address and repair the legacy of those harms, particularly as they relate to present day disparities. To that end, UCARE participants represent a broad cross-section of community members and University students, staff and faculty. We hope that our efforts at working collaboratively across sometimes polarized divides represent positive steps towards truth, understanding, repair and authentic relationship. Check out the About page to learn more and read our Vision and Mission Statement.

“[public culture] … will never be truly reformed, I argue, unless
the past we ought to mourn is mourned in fact, in public, and in a
context of concrete gestures and measures that put the past behind us
in our very act of confronting it.” Donald Shriver, Honest Patriots

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Call for Reflection and Action

We are pleased to announce the public release of our most recent project, a report entitled the “Call for Reflection and Action!”  This report describes what we have learned to date about the history and legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination, as well as efforts to confront those wrongs, as they apply to the University of Virginia and the surrounding community.  Besides sharing what we have learned from dozens of interviews and meetings, it contains specific actions that everyone can take to address today’s problems. We consider this document to be our most important project to date and we are currently soliciting feedback on our findings.  Please read it and comment, criticize, suggest actions, or tell your story!

We recently held an open forum concerning the release of this document.  Click here to read some of the press coverage of that event.  More detailed information about the ideas discussed at the forum will be available soon.

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Check out the calendar below and the What’s New? page for the most recent news and upcoming events. You can also read our Current Projects list to see what we are working on now or read the Resources page for some important documents.  If you have any questions, ideas, comments, etc., please contact us!