Thank you to everyone who joined this month’s Zoom meeting, and our group conversation with Extension Regional Director, Angela Sandino.

Angela shared insights from her experience building an equity plan in the North Willamette Region (Washington, Multnomah and Clackamas counties), and provided strategies for communicating across cultures, and effectively establishing relationships with our stakeholders. This post provides a brief recap and the meeting slides for reference (linked above), but does not replace the group conversation experience, where the maximum value for participants of this program is gained.

We kicked off this month’s session with an overview of Culture, which is defined as,
“integrated patterns of human behavior that include the language, thoughts, communication, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and norms of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups.”

Using Zaretta Hammond’s (https://crtandthebrain.com/about/), three levels of culture (Surface, Shallow and Deep), Angela helped us identify strategies to become more aware of our own cultural framework, before we begin to build trust with others. The Cultural Framework questions we examined can be found on slides 53 & 54 above, and are followed by guidance for better understanding the cultures of our stakeholders.

This session concluded with an overview of the North Willamette Region’s strategy and plan for expanding access to their programs and services. Details about the goals and action steps can be found on slides 62-64 of the presentation above, and we encourage you to reach out if you have any specific questions or could use support with an equity action plan for your program or area.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone next month to continue our final program module: Courageous Leadership. Please take care until then!

In partnership,

Your DEI Team