Dismantling the Racial Wealth Gap: A Guide to Designing Trust and Building Systemic Change
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Date
2025-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Dismantling the Racial Wealth Gap is a design intervention completed in partnership with Huntington National Bank. It is the process and research tools needed for Huntington to build trusting, active, and equitable relationships with Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities that have been oppressed and exploited. To help Huntington engage in this intervention, a guidebook and activity workbook were created. Through this process, Huntington can start outlining how the American financial system created a racial wealth gap through the systems of oppression they are situated in, establish relationships, and work towards systemic change with BIPOC communities.
The project is an eight-phase process responsible for establishing relationships and working towards systemic change through actions such as internal reflection, conducting workshops, and understanding and implementing the results of phase outcomes. These phases are opportunities for Huntington to acquire more knowledge about their role in the financial system by conducting research through design techniques and taking direct action against financial systems of oppression built upon BIPOC communities. The guide works in tandem with a still in-progress activity workbook that details steps of different actions, toolkits, and planning techniques that Huntington would need to complete the recommended phases.
The strategies, techniques, and activities outlined in the project are derived from analytical, participatory, and design-centered research techniques surrounding liberation, community engagement, and design justice. The steps taken to develop this process include secondary research and primary research. The secondary research includes one literature review and four design conjectures. The primary research includes two site visits to Huntington, two interviews with financial advocacy groups (n=2), one poverty simulation game workshop (n=9), two formative assessments and one workshop designed to understand financial success through BIPOC community members in Columbus, Ohio (n=0).
As Huntington starts to potentially work through this process, they will work towards understanding their positionality as a structure upholding financial systems of oppression, building horizontal and equitable relationships, creating lasting coalitions with oppressed peoples, having open discussions with people marginalized by the financial system, and conducting focused workshops to work closely with communities to begin to design and ignite systemic change and direct action within Huntington, and by extension, the broader American financial system. This will help Huntington move towards just banking, which looks like equitable access to capital, accessible services for everyone, and ethical investments. The racial wealth gap will not end through this process, but it will start creating freedom, resilience, and sustainable financial growth in both the bank and in BIPOC communities.
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Keywords
Race, Wealth, Bank, Systemic, Change, Equity