Celebrating diversity

• Host a diversity panel discussion capturing best practices in your communities. Include staff, community partners, diversity practitioners from your area.
  
• Have a focus session to enhance knowledge of diverse communities, demographic trends, languages, communication patterns of your service area. Include implications for future service needs.
  
• Explore the diversity within your offices by asking for volunteers to share experiences, customs, cultures. Organize presentations, potlucks, or panel discussions. Recognize the languages spoken in your service area by having volunteers write names or phrases in the languages spoken by office staff.
  
• Extend an invitation to the local Native American community to come and speak about the history and the needs of the area.
  
• Invite an expert of Middle Eastern cultures to give an overview of the culture and what it means for Arab Americans living in the USA now.
  
• Partner with local Office of Vocational Rehabilitation Services to bring Windmills training or disability awareness training to staff. Contact Centers for Independent Living for more information on presentations regarding serving people with disabilities.
  
• Have a session on working with people in poverty. Provide examples of how to improve communication skills and deliver services in a respectful manner.
  
• Get volunteers from staff and outside participants to create a display portraying family diversity. The goal would be to emphasize the message that families come in different forms, with a breadth of diversity and family configurations. If you need help with this let me know and remember not to use client photographs.
  
• Bring in diversity practitioners from the county, university, community college, non-profits, schools or the private sector to share what they are doing to make programs or services more cultural competent. You will be amazed as to how willing people are to come and share best practices.
  
• Contact your local Chamber of Commerce, diversity groups, churches, schools, higher education to find out about art, crafts, musical groups, dance groups, that would be willing to come to your offices or share their diverse crafts and art. Native American dance groups, Mexican folkloric dance groups, African American choirs, Asian and Pacific Islander dance or musical groups come to mind as possible offerings.
  
• Create a work environment that reflects the multi-cultural setting of your service area. Take one of your lobby areas as a project and include feedback from your clients/ customers.
  
• Identify opportunities to engage or collaborate with diverse communities in your local area.
  
• Contact the DHS Training Unit, your local library, or college to obtain resource information on diversity training, displays, posters, books, tapes, and articles. Create a display bulletin or table and update on a monthly basis depending on the celebration of the month, e.g., Black History Month, Disability Awareness Month, and so forth.