We are living in a very unique global moment. Since the 1960s, there has not been a time where there is explicit rhetoric that is intentionally divisive, xenophobic, and racist, especially in the United States. In these last fifty years, scholars have done all of the heavy lifting around identifying the causes and solutions to these problems. The challenge for our time is to be able to apply this knowledge to influence the decisions and behavior of public actors.
This is the challenge Be More America, a social enterprise based in New York City, has taken on. Be More America trains in evidence-based tools and strategies that break bias in order to create measurable shifts in beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors of professionals with decision-making power. Specifically, they empower professionals to hack unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias. Unconscious bias is an ingrained habit of thoughts that affects the way people perceive, reason, and make decisions. It has been measured to be one of the major causes of identity-based inequalities in the United States and possibly across the globe.
Be More America has already trained over 500 professionals from across industries such as medicine, law, philanthropy, and civil society organizations. Their work has created a difference measured through attitudinal surveys and the Implicit Association Test (IAT), one of the leading measurements for unconscious bias. They will be studying a panel of participants such as doctors, police officers, and teachers for perception and behavior change over a significant period of time.
Their work has been recognized by Points of Light Foundation, President H.W. Bush’s legacy organization, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the W K Kellogg Foundation. It was recently awarded the Echoing Green Global Fellowship, which is a premier fellowship for incubating ideas for radical social change.
Anurag Gupta is the 30-year-old Founder & CEO of Be More America. Anurag has dedicated his career to innovating solutions to society’s intractable challenges. He developed a program to foster critical thinking among Burmese youth; supported women’s groups from around the world to express their grievances to international treaty bodies; designed a research project that identified the root causes of race-based disparities in America; provided counsel to various criminal justice reform projects at the Vera Institute of Justice; and published academic articles on triple-bottom-line corporate structures. His work has been profiled in the Huffington Post, the International Institute of Education, and #BKLive (Brooklyn TV show), among other platforms. Anurag has a JD from NYU School of Law, a master’s from Cambridge University, and a bachelor’s in international relations and Islamic studies from NYU.