Administrative Reform to Overcome Institutional Racism: Exploring Government’s Trust Building Tactics to Renew Relationships with Community-based Organizations

Abstract

Institutional racism embedded in the existing public management practices has systematically created distrust between community-based organizations serving Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC). However, little is known about how the government could reform public bureaucracies to renew their relationship with these important community-based organizations. Through a process-oriented inductive study of Minnesota’s 2-Generation Policy Network, we find that government’s intentional tactics both inside the bureaucracy and with BIPOC community-based organizations allowed them to create new collaborative infrastructure that both changed organizational routines and built power to address racial inequities in the existing human service system. This study documents the importance of public managers’ intentionality in addressing the historical legacy that is an outgrowth of conventional practice and assessing their own identities to assess and challenge the mechanism of traditional, bureaucratic authority. Trust between the government and BIPOC community-based organizations needs to be earned and rebuilt.