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Teaching the Isms

For almost 10 years I have been working on an internal multicultural initiative for the Mankind Project. What started as a 3 year commitment has turned into a project that has had me and others creating and presenting multicultural workshops from Philadelphia to San Francisco, from the Hobbemma Cree Reservation outside of Edmonton, Canada to looking at francophone language issues in Montreal, as well as looking at diverse language and cultural dynamics in Miami-Dade, Fl. Others have taken the workshop as far as France, the UK, and South Africa.

I currently serve as the Chair of the MKP Multicultural Council and on the MKP Executive committee. I have had the pleasure of holding the line for multicultural awareness as a core value of the organization. I am proud to be part of an organization that unanimously committed to doing what was necessary to increase diversity in their centers.

In getting to this place I have had to look at power differentials and behaviors in myself in order to see it in others. I have had to face my own shadows around elitism and find my own leadership in this organization. In a way we were given an entrepreneurial opportunity to make something happen, and I am proud of the work we have done so far, AND there is still much work to do.

What I have noticed most recently is a cyclical dynamic where we regularly have to prove or justify the multicultural initiative and its process to many of the people I serve. Either the training isn't enough, not experiential enough, too wordy, not professional enough, or it creates problems, etc. And then in speaking to a man I hadn't spoken to in a long time he commented to me that the work we have been doing has been making a big difference in the meetings he goes to. Men being asked to own their biases, to work on their stuff, to learn the language.

When I hear that it invigorates me and my mission just a little bit. I am hopeful to be going abroad soon to do another training.

The name of the training is Isms & Issues. I have found it to be sometimes even more impactful for those outside of the organization.

I call it the little workshop that did. It has changed an organization and is still very pertinent and necessary to the changes we want from ourselves and our organization. Here is a brochure.

Keep an eye on this site. I hope to include more of what I have learned over the years out here.

M

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