Overview: The Inland Equity Grid (IEG) project has launched, providing a shared picture of the region’s social infrastructure and highlighting where the gaps are. The IEG is a “backbone system” designed for agencies to collaborate, and includes a Community Conditions Analysis feature that maps air quality data, dental access, health metrics, racial and ethnic demographics, and SNAP enrollment rates across neighborhoods. The IEG is not a public-facing system, and residents should call United Way 211 for assistance. The launch of the IEG highlighted the need for structural reckoning, not incremental fixes, and a redesigned relationship between communities and governance.
Aryana Noroozi
Speakers and organizers alike recalled when the Inland Equity Grid (IEG) was just an idea – it was when the Arc of Safety Summit held its first gathering. At the ninth, its project finally launched – and the keynote where it was unveiled, highlighted its critical prevalence now more than ever.
Michelle Decker, President and CEO of the Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF), kickstarted the day’s programming with a call for structural reckoning, not incremental fixes. Speaking to a room of nonprofit leaders and community organizers, she argued that the sector already has the abilities and knowledge to drive transformation, but what sometimes can be missing is the political and economic will to act.
“We have extraordinary knowledge, information and data,” she said. “We know how to put together policies and ideas that can propel this country forward.”
Decker framed the moment as a crossroads toward what she defined as a “multiracial democracy,” one that requires not just expanded voting access but a redesigned relationship between communities and governance.
“We have to give more access, not less, to people – not just voting, but design decision-making,” she said, describing frustration with elected officials who struggle to understand why community members show up to public meetings with urgency.
“This is personal when you do this work in the nonprofit sector, the community-based sector,” Decker said.
She also named the structural driver she believes underlies much of the crisis work in the room: a strain of capitalism she described as running unchecked. “There is no country where the top 1% owns as much as the bottom 90%,” she said, pressing the audience to think beyond policy patches toward alternative ownership models and tax structures.
“I think we’re sort of done with band-aids,” Decker said, posing an alternative thought:”Doing the thing that gets you to the thing you want. Doing the thing that builds to the next thing, that’s what strategic means.”
Minister Debra Williams, Founding CEO of Building Resilient Communities—a non profit organization that address vulnerabilities like poverty, systemic inequities, and isolation by providing resources, training, and partnerships that strengthen safety, health, and resilience—echoed that same sentiment – one of collaborative data, policy and community organizing work – in an exclusive interview with Black Voice News.
“We talked about this at the very first one,” Williams said. “Nine summits later, it’s coming to life.”
The IEG catalogs agencies operating across the region – from Corona to Blythe, rural to urban – logging who they are, what services they provide, where they work, and which populations they serve. The goal is to give emergency coordinators, city officials, and nonprofit leaders a shared picture of the region’s social infrastructure and, critically, where the gaps are.
Williams was direct about what the IEG is not: a hotline for residents.
“The Inland Equity Grid is not a public-facing system,” she said. “United Way 211 is where residents should call.” She described the IEG as a “backbone system,” one designed for agencies to collaborate, not a replacement for frontline services.
She offered a concrete use case: when recent SNAP benefit cuts left a city official scrambling to locate food distribution sites, there was no centralized way to find them. With the IEG, that query surfaces the nearest food-providing agencies in minutes.
An embedded Community Conditions Analysis feature adds further depth by mapping air quality data, dental access, health metrics, racial and ethnic demographics, and SNAP enrollment rates across neighborhoods. Color-coded visualizations help agencies identify where compounding disadvantages converge and target services accordingly.
The inequities those maps reveal echoed through Williams’ broader remarks. She has organized the Arc of Safety Summit around a core observation in which surrounds her work: disasters don’t create inequity, but they expose it.
Williams pointed to the current Boyle Heights cold storage facility fire disaster, then entering its eighth day with residents under shelter-in-place orders and toxic smoke blanketing a working-class community of color. “Factories and warehouses get built in places where the most vulnerable live,” she said. “The people who live in Boyle Heights or Colton, they can’t take off work to go to the city council meeting.”
Communities along the interstate 10, 15, 60, and 215 freeways, she noted, live with that reality daily – absorbing concentrated pollution from freight corridors while holding the least political leverage to fight back. But she pushed back against fatalism.
“We think we can’t do anything about it,” she said. “But we can, if we all come together.”
The day also featured programming from the African American Health Equity Collaborative, a monthly coalition that includes environmental advocates and functions as an early warning network, enabling members to “sound the alarm” on emerging threats before they reach communities. Williams called for deeper partnership with local Black press, including Black Voice News, to amplify those alerts.
“You guys are looking for local stories, and we have local stories,” she said. “We want to sound the alarm. You have a much bigger network than we do.”