Michigan residents have a chance to help craft fairer, more equitable legislative districts, and a coalition of nonprofit organizations is banding together to help community groups take advantage of the opportunity.
Redistricting is the once-a-decade process of redrawing legislative districts to account for population changes in the year following the census. In 2018, Michigan voters amended the state constitution to create the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, making citizens and not politicians responsible for drawing the state’s political boundaries.
Michigan’s new redistricting process expressly requires the commission to consider public input. The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Initiative was launched to promote racial equity by ensuring communities of color have input and are not locked out of important decision-making about who represents them in Congress and the Legislature. The initiative builds on a successful prior campaign to mobilize historically undercounted communities to fill out the 2020 Census.
Read more here from the Michigan Nonprofit Association, a Joyce Foundation grantee, and the Council on Michigan Foundations.
About The Joyce Foundation
Joyce is a nonpartisan, private foundation that invests in evidence-informed public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region.