TRICE: The Tri-College University Newspaper
Vol. 34, No. 1 / Fall 2003

Bremer Foundation Awards $175,000 to campuses for TOCAR Anti-Racism Initiative
TOCAR (Training Our Campuses Against Racism), a collaborative anti-racism initiative involving MSU Moorhead, NDSU, Concordia College and Minnesota State Community and Technical College Moorhead, has received a two-year $175,000 grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation. TOCAR is just completing their first Bremer Foundation award of $78,195 which started the initiative.

The TOCAR Collaborative is composed of students, staff and faculty members from each campus, as well as community members, who help steer the initiative on their campus. In Fall 2002, the FM area YWCA joined the Collaborative and several other local community organizations have expressed interest in joining the
Collaborative to engage in systemic antiracism work this Fall. The multi-institutional initiative is being co-coordinated by two MSU Moorhead professors, Phyllis May-Machunda and Amy Phillips.
The goal of this initiative is:
* to dismantle institutional racism at our institutions and enhance our campus climates by holding antiracism trainings for all campus members
* assess the campus climate at each institution and develop campus specific strategic plans for movement toward becoming anti racist/multicultural organizations and enable our campuses to implement those plans. Students, faculty, staff and community- members engage in these issues through campus and community forums with TOCAR antiracism teams on each campus.

TOCAR evolved out of the community study circle process that took place in 2001 in response to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report, "The Status of Equal Opportunity for Minorities in Moorhead, Minnesota." That process created 11 citizen action teams-one of them focusing on higher education-which eventually developed into TOCAR.

During the first grant, TOCAR held trainings on each campus and built antiracism teams which will guide each institutional initiative. With the second grant, the Collaborative will offer more advanced antiracism trainings to further develop the institutional teams, provide support for campus coordination of the initiatives and administer campus wide institututional assessments which will help inform the development of campus specific antiracism plans.

More information about TOCAR can be found at their website: www.mnstate.edu/tocar or by contacting Phillips or May-Machunda at tocar@mnstate.edu.