At Kindred Futures, we are focused on creating innovative community wealth-building solutions to uplift the Talented 90th, a broad base of Black households, including the nearly 2 million Black households in the American South with zero or negative net worth. This means advocating for the scalability of innovative and reparative initiatives for Black families. To understand which solutions are the most impactful, it is important to first understand the underlying historical and present-day determinants and drivers impacting the ability of Black communities to create, protect, and sustain wealth.   

Kindred Futures worked with PolicyMap to build the Mapping Black Wealth Pathways tool, showing how economic policies (e.g., state minimum wage laws) and opportunities (e.g., jobs and wages), and environmental (e.g., climate burden), health (e.g., healthcare access), and living (e.g., housing affordability) conditions are spread across communities and providing or extracting opportunities to build wealth. While many of these data points describe negative conditions, we see them as an opportunity to identify and tailor solutions to support Black communities on their pathway to building collective wealth. 

Data points for the Mapping Black Wealth Pathways Tool were selected to reflect the Kindred Futures R³ Framework: Revenue, Resilience, and Repair.  At Kindred Futures, the R³ framework—Revenue, Resilience, and Repair—grew out of both rigorous research and intentional community listening. In conversations with Black families across the South, we consistently heard that wealth is not simply about assets, but about freedom: the freedom to choose, to secure a future for one’s children, and to thrive without fear of exploitation or loss. Sitting with this wisdom alongside the data, we came to understand that achieving Black prosperity requires a framework broad enough to confront the structural determinants of wealth. R³ reflects that understanding: we must generate new income and assets through Revenue, safeguard those gains through Resilience, and pursue systemic Repair for the harms of dispossession and exclusion. Together, these pillars embody both the urgency of redress and the promise of building lasting, liberatory wealth for Black communities.  

Click on INDICATORS  and get started exploring your community today.  

To get the scoop on how Kindred Futures selected these data points, read Mapping Pathways to Building Collective Black Wealth. 

Pro tip: zoom in and out to view data indicators across various geographic levels (e.g., state, county, zip code tabulation area, and census tract).