Creative Reaction Lab

Antionette Carroll is the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, a nonprofit educating and deploying youth to challenge racial and health inequities impacting Black and Latinx populations. Within this role, Antionette has pioneered an award-winning form of creative problem solving called Equity-Centered Community Design (named a Fast Company World Changing Idea Finalist). Through this capacity, Antionette has received several honors including being named an ADL and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellow, Roddenberry Fellow, Echoing Green Global Fellow, TED Fellow, and SXSW Community Service Honoree.

Within her almost 10 years of volunteer leadership, Antionette was named the Founding Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force of AIGA: The Professional Association of Design. During her tenure, she founded and launched several initiatives, including the Design Census Program with Google and national Design for Inclusivity Summit with Microsoft. Additionally, she’s the co-founder of the Design + Diversity Conference and Fellowship.

Black and Latinx populations are working to survive the public health challenge of racism - an embedded system that impacts life expectancies. Due to racial inequities, individuals are more likely to have shorter lifespans based on access, awareness, and biases. Creative Reaction Lab is building a youth-led, community-centered movement where Black and Latinx are trained to address real-world forms of racial and health inequities (such as food apartheids and limited public transportation access).

According to the United States, Census Bureau, by 2050, Black and Latinx communities will make up almost 40% of the United States population, many of whom are currently youth. Yet, these communities face disproportionate racial and health inequities that limit social, economic, and cultural growth. In addition to the integration of racially and economically oppressive policies and systems throughout U.S. American history, Black and Latinx students are being underserved by traditional pedagogical methods. This is largely due to cultural history erasure throughout education systems, media framing, policies, etc., and it results in youth being unaware of recently passed and current history that continues to impact their communities’ environment (e.g. mass incarceration, redlining, etc.). Besides erasure, historically-underinvested people of color have been unheard, unsupported, and excluded from decision making opportunities to amplify their power and work toward liberation — even though many decisions impact their cultural and community health.

Creative Reaction Lab is building a youth-led, community-centered movement of a new type of Civic Leader: Redesigners for Justice. Creative Reaction Lab’s mission is to educate, train, and challenge Black and Latinx youth to become leaders designing healthy and racially equitable communities. We’re challenging the belief that only adults with titles (e.g. mayors, CEOs, etc.) have the power and right to challenge racial and health inequities. However, we are conscious that it’s not just the work of the people that have been historically underinvested to dismantle oppressive systems. Creative Reaction Lab’s flagship programs are REFRESH: Redesigning Education for Racial Equity and Social Healing and the Community Design Apprenticeship Program.

Redesigning Education for Racial Equity and Social Healing (REFRESH) is an intergenerational civic engagement program for youth and educators to understand their roles in designing healthy and racially equitable outcomes, amplify and shift power to young leaders, and collectively shift education structures to support social healing.

Through the Community Design Apprenticeship Program, we are educating and training formerly incarcerated and criminal justice system impacted Black and Latinx youth to become civic leaders addressing hyperlocal racial and health inequities (e.g. limited healthy food access, housing displacement, and mass incarceration).

Creative Reaction Lab works in Black and Latinx communities within the United States, and more deeply in St. Louis and Denver Metro for our youth programming. Our primary audience of focus is Black and Latinx youth (26 years old and younger) from historically-underinvested communities (and thus affected by poverty, deteriorating educational institutions, limited mobility, etc.).

Within the Community Design Apprenticeship Program, we are centering formerly incarcerated and criminal justice system impacted Black and Latinx youth as we believe their voices have too often been erased from discussions around social justice, community development, and civic engagement. As individuals that have been extremely affected by oppressive systems (especially through the inequities associated with xenophobia and institutional racism), we believe that these individuals not only bring value as program beneficiaries but also living experts that have intimate proximity to the problem and possible solutions.

Within Redesigning Racial Equity for Social Healing, we are working with educators working within historically-underinvested communities of color. (Conscious that most educational institutions have primarily White Women as instructors, we also are working to connect with educators of color through partnerships.)

Creative Reaction Lab was founded in response to the uprising in Ferguson. Our Founder was a former resident of Ferguson and Michael Brown Jr.’s death amplified her frustrations regarding systemic racism and the lack of community voice when responding to civic issues. Due to this, she brought together design­ers and activists for a 24-hour ideation ses­sion to look at sus­tain­able approaches to St. Louis’ racial divide. At the end of the night, five ideas were prototyped, with all five projects being activated within the year. These projects ranged from public art efforts to online civic action tools. At the end of 2016, our programming shifted from engaging only the "general population" to capacity building for Black and Latinx youth.

As a native of St. Louis, a city some have started to call the new hub of the civil rights and equity movement, I’ve seen segregation, good intentions, and developing “reports” to fix a problem impact historically-underinvested Black communities beyond access but particularly life expectancies. According to RWJF, every seven minutes a Black person dies prematurely due to the effects of racial discrimination. This reality is a generational curse that affects lower-income communities of color - and many of us don’t even know it. I, too, was (and am) a product of this ignorance. Being an Black woman that grew up in poverty, trauma and resilience is the norm. In my family, my Black male relatives have yet to make it pass the age of 55 due to health complications, drug abuse, and/or gun violence. Literally two years ago, my 14-year old brother was an unarmed victim of gun violence.

Throughout the duration of my post-secondary education, professional career, and volunteerism, I’ve advocated for diversity, inclusion, and equity. In addition to my accomplishments as the Founder, President and CEO of Creative Reaction Lab, previously during my tenure at a St. Louis-based nonprofit called Diversity Awareness Partnership, I designed and launched the citywide Listen. Talk. Learn. public awareness campaign and co-created the community-wide training program. Five years later, hundreds of St. Louisians are still being trained in Listen. Talk. Learn. educational programs. Additionally, as a volunteer of AIGA: The Professional Association of Design, I founded and co-led the first national Design for Inclusivity Summit, created the D&I Residency program, named the founding chair of the national D&I Task Force, and co-created and co-organized the first Racial Justice by Design program. My work being a DEI specialist has been recognized by TED, Echoing Green, ESSENCE Magazine, Fast Company and more.

Late 2016, the board and I decided to pivot Creative Reaction Lab’s programmatic approach and refine our target beneficiaries to Black and Latinx populations. Our first official youth program was Design to Better [Our City], a civic engagement and community development program that challenges Black and Latinx high school youth to collaboratively develop solutions addressing racial and economic inequities. We received funding. We recruited college mentors. Then, we received two youth applications. I was devastated. However, instead of quitting, I went back to the drawing board. After conducting research with teachers and youth, we found that an after school program was not accessible to our target audience. Testing a new model, we’ve been hired to facilitate our curriculum within pre-established youth programs with Trio Upward Bound and nPower. We went on to host two summer academies and then converted our years of experience into the curriculum for our national Redesigning Education for Racial Equity and Social Healing program.

Within St. Louis, MO (my hometown and the headquarters of Creative Reaction Lab) and throughout the United States, Black and Latinx populations have been significantly impacted by COVID-19. (For example, within St. Louis, so far only Black people have died due to COVID.) Prior to COVID-19, health and racial inequities were impacting these populations and life expectancy disparities have even more so been exacerbated due to the pandemic. That being said, even within this historically underinvested community there is a group of people that have indirectly been ignored by relief and mobilization efforts beyond school support: Black and Latinx youth. On April 9, Creative Reaction Lab opened the Youth Creative Leadership Fund for Black and Latinx youth (26 and under). This fund would provide micro-grants of $100 to youth with requests for support in self-care and personal finances, creative responses to COVID-19, or passing on to people and/or hyperlocal organizations in need. More details on the three categories are here: https://medium.com/equal-space/covid-19-youth-creative-leadership-fund-7189b2559578. Closing the application on April 22, we received 320 applications (268 for self-care category, 29 for creative responses category, 23 for pass it on category). Ultimately, I've been able to raise funds to support 244 young leaders.