Exploring Diversity Tips

Diversity is a hard topic for people and yet it is one of the keys to how groups function, internally and within the community they serve. The understanding of a partnership's collective diversity serves as a key to the services they deliver. People need the opportunity to talk about themselves in order to share their own culture and create a sense of themselves within a group. These are good activities to include community members into to develop a sense of trust between the Collaboration and the outside world. The more trust the easier it is to work together.

• We need to nurture each other's self idenitity
• We need to promote interactions among each other to learn about each other.
• We need to understand our own bias.
• We need to be able to speak out against bias.

The activities within this section are designed to be helpful tools for partnerships. They are activities which are meant to promote discussions of differences and similarities. They are not quick activities and the suggestion is to use them as a whole meeting activity. Activities are for:

• Discussion of differences and similarities
• Reflection on our own culture
• Inclusion of all members

Each activity can be incorporated into a gathering of the partnership members, although the suggestion for this section is to add community membership so all cultures are represented in the activities, thus making them richer and more meaningful in content. These activities are longer than the others in this collection and tend to become an event within themselves.