South Dakota State University
Report date
May 2021
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Relationships and connections in the community were vital to recruitment for both the first phase of focus groups and second phase of community conversations for our grant project. Because of COVID-19, we had to become more resourceful in reaching out to community members through our community partners' existing connections. While we did attempt to reach everyone in the community through various press releases and flyers with both phases of our grant project, the most effective means of recruiting participants was through the relationships and community connections of our community partners. We could not have completed the first two phases of our grant project without these key partners: Brookings Area Chamber of Commerce, Brookings Economic Development Corporation, Vision Brookings, and Brookings Human Rights Commission. Additionally, the relationships of our South Dakota State University personnel were vital to reaching out to stakeholders. Because each of us on the team has a different connection to the community and different networks, we were able to reach a wide variety of participants who represented a wide variety of perspectives and interests in the community.
Communication has driven this research project. From August - December 2020, we held 14 focus groups with 83 participants from our community across these stakeholder groups: business leaders and human resources professionals, K-12 educators, culturally diverse employees (in industries such as food service/retail, healthcare, farms/agriculture, higher education, and manufacturing), faith-based leaders, and long-term (10+ years) Brookings County residents. Based on the focus group discussions of their experiences surrounding cultural diversity in the workplace, along with their ideas for how to improve inclusion in Brookings, we created a Community Conversation Guide. This guide served as the framework for our two Community Conversations (one in person and one virtual), held in April 2021. We trained volunteer facilitators from our Brookings Inclusive Collaborative team and from the Spring 2021 Argumentation & Debate class at South Dakota State University. These facilitators led 37 community participants through a guided public deliberation. People shared experiences with cultural diversity in the workplace and discussed different approaches to enhance inclusion in our community.
As noted above, our project team held trainings for anyone leading focus groups or small group discussions at the Community Conversations. Because diversity and inclusion can be difficult and 'rhetorically loaded' topics to discuss freely, facilitator and focus group leader trainings were important to equipping team members and volunteer facilitators to be able to handle these kinds of difficult discussions. Focus group participants freely shared their experiences with cultural diversity in the workplace. We arranged their experiences into the following themes: 1) racism and micro aggressions, 2) language barriers, 3) difficulty recruiting diverse employees and leaders, 4) discomfort talking about cultural differences, and 5) feeling a lack of belonging to Brookings. The honest discussions in the focus groups allowed for openness and vulnerability in sharing common experiences around cultural diversity and inclusion. Training focus group leaders to lead these frank discussions was an important reason as to why participants felt safe to share such difficult experiences. Facilitators' training was also vital to open and honest dialogue at the Community Conversations in April 2021.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
The element of inclusive within the community innovation process has been the most important to making progress in our work. Grant team leadership was diligent in recruiting diverse stakeholders and their perspectives into framing the issue of cultural diversity in the workplace and inclusion in Brookings. The fact that our team was able to hold 14 focus groups with 83 participants during the COVID-19 pandemic is impressive, especially given that we quickly had to pivot some of those focus groups to occur virtually due to increases in COVID cases in our community in November 2020. The inclusive approach to recruiting participants for the focus groups allowed us to create a strong Community Conversation Guide that framed the next phase of our grant project - the Community Conversations. These Community Conversations were open to anyone in the community to attend. Increasing collective understanding of the issue of diversity and inclusion in the focus groups helped generate more inclusive ideas for the Community Conversation discussions. That will in turn allow for more inclusive prioritization of actions when we hold another Community Conversation Planning Meeting in August 2021.
Understanding the problem
We did not fully anticipate or understand the depth of need regarding increasing intercultural competence in the Brookings K-12 School District. This finding emerged from our focus group discussions and was a key part of both Community Conversations, so it seems to be a great opportunity to enhance inclusion in our community. Many participants noted that increasing intercultural competence across the school district will then impact inclusion across the entire community. One of the innovations that emerged from the focus groups is to have the school district hire a cultural liaison to serve as a bridge between the various schools, educators, parents, and community. Another innovation is to host free intercultural competence training for the community. This training will involve participants taking the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) as a tool to measure their ability to interact and communicate across cultural differences. We are planning on holding an intercultural competence training and then having participants complete the IDI in a follow-up meeting sometime in Fall 2021. We will reserve 50 spots for interested participants to improve their intercultural competence.
If you could do it all over again...
While we knew this at the beginning of the grant period, we would reiterate to ourselves how difficult yet how significant the work of increasing diversity and enhancing inclusion in a rural community can be. The educational process is a key part of the work of this grant project - people must come to terms with what diversity and inclusion mean, understand how and why they are significant to Brookings, and consider their own role in this work as it relates to our community. There will always be some community members who may not see the value of diversity and inclusion, and part of our job with this grant project is to help explain that value, especially in its role in economic development and future growth in Brookings. This educational process is part of the work we are doing through this grant. We continue to need to go back to increasing understanding of the issue of diversity and inclusion because everyone is at a different place in terms of comfort with diversity and motivation to want to increase inclusion in our community. Recognizing that we might take two steps forward, one step back, in terms of implementing actions, will be key in moving forward with our grant project.