A student-run nonprofit started in Chicago.Rooted Forward educates people about racial inequality in cities across the United States, and works to address it through education, awareness, and political advocacy.

Rooted Forward was started by Zain Zaidi, a student who lives on the Near South Side and goes to school in Hyde Park. Going between the two every day, he kept running into the bubble around the University of Chicago, and how completely the city changed from one block to the next.

He went looking for why, and found redlining, restrictive covenants, and the urban renewal campaigns that cleared and rearranged these blocks on purpose. The pattern he had been walking through every day was drawn on a map decades before he was born.

The next thing he wanted to know was how much of this the neighborhood already knew. He ran a survey at the Obama Presidential Center and talked with more than 140 people about what they had lived through and what they had been taught. The gap was far wider than he expected, including among lifelong Chicagoans and especially among young people.

So he built this. Students in three cities do the archival work and run the outreach now, and what comes out of it gets published free.

The policy side comes from his seat on Chicago’s Mayor’s Youth Commission. Sitting in those rooms is where he saw how much a single ordinance can move, and how few people outside City Hall are ever there when one is decided. Rooted Forward works on that in small steps, on bills that are already written and already stalled.