Diversity Committee Meeting – May 18, 2006
Present at meeting: Bright, Manoff, Agnew, Gray, Braquet, Flynn, Drain, and Mundava
1. Announcements
Donna thanked everyone who participated in and helped with the International Festival table. She said a special thank you for Rita for organizing everyone for the event.
2. ReCap – Celebrating Employee Diversity Month
Kawanna recapped the Celebrating Employment month, announcing that though turnout for the Lunch ‘N View sessions was not overwhelming, it was still considered a success and that future Lunch ‘N Views are being planned. The Family Reunion Food Fest had a great turnout and we will consider doing something similar, but in a different time of the year. April proved to be too busy of a month for that type of event. A follow-up survey was suggested to see what people liked about the month of celebration and what they did not like, to help us determine what we might wish to continue doing in the future.
3. Possible future guest speaker – Wanda Costen
Maud introduced the possibility of Wanda Costen, professor in Retail Sciences, coming to speak at the Libraries. One of Wanda’s research areas is in Diversity and she is teaching a summer course on Diversity Issues. Wanda also has suggestions for books that we might consider purchasing and adding to our collection. We should consider questions we might want to ask her. Maud also suggested that we might be able to partner with SDAC and training to bring Wanda in for a discussion of diversity.
4. Training the Trainer opportunity with Ag-Vet. Future session with Lennisa and OED? Discussion of Need for Future Session (please see Tom’s e-mail).
Cheryl mentioned that she has attended the diversity training downtown and that it offers real group involvement. The focus was on supervising. Donna suggested that we need to go straight to having a departmental session with OED rather than the Diversity Committee having a session. Cheryl suggested that the supervisors of each department could be the ones who attend a session. This would give them a chance to see what the training entailed and prepare their staff for future training or take what they’ve learned back to their teams.
Maribeth suggested that in terms of the committee’s training, we could look at having someone from OED, possibly Lenissa, come and help us with our Committee goals.
The final suggestion would be to broach the subject with LMG first. We should prepare a report with our suggestions for training for LMG to include possible avenues that we could take, and that considered what LMG would want, a possible timetable. Kawanna suggested that a subgroup would probably be best to work on preparing the report and she will approach Tom with the possibility of leading the small group.
Donna also suggested that we take a look at our Diversity Action plan to see how training is mentioned. If training is a part of our action plan this will go a long way towards our position with LMG. Maribeth inquired of Donna about the set of topics of the workshops that she is working on with Lennisa and Donna informed the group that they are pretty focused on particular topics. The general consensus was that whatever type of training we offer, it should probably be more general but everyone also agreed that with Tom’s e-mail a distinct problem area was identified and needs to be addressed.
Other suggestions and thoughts included preparing a bibliography of videos or resources that people could see related to the topic; Suggesting that the supervisors not attend sessions together so that they could feel more free to express themselves during sessions. The main goal is to make sure people don’t feel forced into going.
5. Culture Corner Update
Kawanna updated the group on the Culture Corner progress. The summer Corner will be in place by May 31st. Kawanna also announced that Maud has agreed to take over as coordinator of the Corner beginning with the fall 2006 semester.
The next meeting is currently scheduled for June 1st at 1:00 p.m. in Hodges 605. The meeting was adjourned.
Respectfully submitted by Kawanna Bright
May 22, 2006