South Dakota State University CI Report – Interim

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.

Key lessons learned

As noted above, we were largely able to achieve our grant activities and outcomes through our community partners’ relationships and connections in the community. However, recruiting for focus groups and for our Community Conversations was difficult, arduous, and time-consuming for the grant team leaders. It took many phone calls, emails, flyers, social media posts, and personal texts to recruit 83 participants for the focus groups and 37 participants for the Community Conversations. In recruiting both volunteer facilitators and participants for our Community Conversations, we learned that we probably need to strengthen both our project team and our larger community’s buy-in. For example, while we had room in our virtual Community Conversation for 100 participants, and we had 36 participants register for the event, only 19 participants actually came to the virtual event. There might be a wide variety of causes for why people did not commit to attending the event after having registered, including difficulties with COVID-19 and exhaustion with virtual events, but it was still disheartening to have so many people register yet not show up.

Another lesson learned as a result of our project team’s work is that it is difficult for majority white communities to come to terms with the topic of diversity and inclusion. While our project team and community certainly include advocates of diversity and inclusion, others in the community are skeptical of the importance of discussing cultural diversity in the workplace or might not see diversity and inclusion as essential to economic development and growth in our community. Continuing to improve one’s intercultural competence is difficult, lifelong work; no one will become interculturally competent in a single training, focus group, or Community Conversation. As noted earlier with our difficulties in recruitment for our events, perhaps motivating a majority white community to want to discuss diversity and enhance inclusion in Brookings is a bigger ask than we may realize. Additionally, majority community members do not have to address diversity or inclusion if they do not want to, due to their privilege in their lived experiences. This lack of motivation may be a systemic failure of the responsibility of dominant or majority cultural groups to engage in this topic.

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.

Other key elements of Community Innovation

The buy-in of our grant team leaders has been an important component of our project’s successes so far. We held 14 focus groups and two Community Conversations amidst a global pandemic. As such, the grant team leaders have taken on more responsibilities than originally anticipated in the grant budget. For example, our team lost the second co-principal investigator who was supposed to help lead the grant project fairly early in our project’s timeline. This co-principal investigator left SDSU and did not work on the grant starting in August 2020. While she was able to be a part of the team up to August 2020, we did not begin any grant activities until August 2020 due to the pandemic. As such, we have requested moving that salary to Dr. Enz and Dr. Kuehl’s Summer 2022 salaries because of the unanticipated extra work. Dr. Drury has also helped out more than anticipated in planning and implementing the Community Conversations. Due to COVID-19, Dr. Drury was unable to visit Brookings and instead led Dr. Enz and Dr. Kuehl through the process of planning and implementing the deliberations from afar, including extra weekly meetings. We will also pay her salary for this work in Summer 2022.

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.

One last thought

COVID-19 has impacted every step of our project. We haven’t had the opportunity to do in-person meetings to build rapport among our grant project team and develop stronger buy-in. We have found that you cannot build the same rapport via virtual meetings as you can in person. Additionally, we had planned to have a large food budget as part of our grant project and haven’t really been able to spend much of that money. We will do another Community Conversation in the fall and hope to spend some of those funds then; however, as noted above, we also asked to move some of that money to salary for Dr. Drury to account for the extra unanticipated work of her assisting Dr. Enz and Dr. Kuehl with planning and implementing the Community Conversations from afar. We are planning on scheduling a revised team picture outdoors and having a brief debriefing meeting with the full team this summer. At that meeting, we will try to increase our team’s rapport and collaborative sprit by asking questions such as the following: Where are we at with the process? What do you want to be involved in regarding the implementation phase? What are you drawn towards and energized by? Team-building will be key.