Source
The Opportunity Agenda
The Social Justice Phrase Guide
Access posture
About
The Opportunity Agenda is a social justice communication lab; the Social Justice Phrase Guide (2015) was produced with Advancement Project, a multi-racial civil rights organization. It is a compact two-page handout of phrase-level framing advice for advocates: use identity terms as adjectives rather than nouns (“Black people,” not “Blacks”), watch loaded frames like reform and “on welfare,” and choose precise terms over euphemism.
On the commons’ source spectrum this is a progressive equity guide — and together with the Movement Strategy Center glossary, one of the two movement-communications anchors added to the corpus in June 2026. It works at the phrase level (how a sentence positions people) rather than by headword definition, so it tends to appear as a secondary voice on terms anchored elsewhere.
Access
The guide is a free public PDF on The Opportunity Agenda’s site (linked above) and was live as of the last check — the archived copy is byte-identical to the live file. Host posture is private-mirror-link-out: the commons keeps a private preservation copy for citation verification and links readers to the authoritative version. Quotes are held within fair-use limits.
Publication details
Version history
- 2015 edition Current canonical
October 2015; a collaboration with Advancement Project. The live PDF's 2023 upload path serves the same 2015 file.
Terms citing this source
- Poor Avoid
“This can often be done by using terms as adjectives rather than nouns … or by actively putting "people" first (i.e. people with disabilities vs. disabled people; people living in poverty vs. poor people; people who are homeless vs. homeless people).”
— "Identity & Personhood" intro, person-first examples