Creating a Healthier Multicultural Comm.

Creating a Healthier Multicultural Community Project

The Creating a Healthier Multicultural Community Project was a response to the desire of many residents of the predominantly white La Crosse region to widen their awareness, understanding, respect and empathy for the lived realities of people with a wide range of racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

2019 Completed Components:
Facilitator Training: Nurturing Diversity Partners’ anti-racist educators Reggie Jackson and Dr. Fran Kaplan held a 2-day facilitator training workshop. Twenty-eight local ethnically and racially diverse participants successfully completed this training held in La Crosse.

Deep Dive Small Group Facilitated Dialogues: Forty-eight La Crosse area community leaders participated in four 3-hour small group discussions exploring topics of bias, history and its impacts on racial disparities, unconscious bias, and present-day status of racism. The attendees included community leaders from public school administration, judicial, police, hospital administration, government, business, Health and Human Services, the colleges, churches and community organizations. These discussions were facilitated by our locally trained small group facilitators, under the supervision of Reggie Jackson and Dr. Fran Kaplan. The facilitators and the attendees from the Deep Dives are a community resource creating a secondary wave of change by taking this work further into our community.

Public Presentations: Two public presentations, How Did We Get Here? The Hidden Impacts of Racial Disparities and Unconscious Bias: Can We See Our Own Blind Spots?-were given in the Fall of 2019. Each was attended by approximately 300 people.

Thinking differently about difference

2020 Ongoing Components:
2020 Regional Read of Waking Up White: “Book Chat Meet-ups” are orchestrated by the La Crosse Public Library and other community partners. These are small group theme-based discussions and are free and open to the public. They will be facilitated by local people who received their training from Nurturing Diversity Partners’ anti-racist educators Reggie Jackson and Dr. Fran Kaplan.

Ongoing Gatherings of the Deep Dive Attendees: Monthly the facilitators and community leaders who participated in the 2020 Deep Dive Dialogues are offered the opportunity to gather and continue the discussion around the issues of race and anti-racism work using Waking Up White and other material as springboards.