Celebrating and Promoting Diversity - Best Practices
20 WAYS TO CELEBRATE DIVERSITY
- Hold a pot luck luncheon with foods representing the cultures of staff members.
- Create a display of staff family trees with photos and short narratives about family nationality, background and journey to the USA.
- Hold a non-English day (week) where a selected language other than English will be used in general conversation. Depending on the staff demographics, more than one day may be required to accommodate several languages.
- Establish a book reading activity (book club) to explore different cultures represented among staff, or representing patients and customers.
- Hold a departmental workshop to explore the integration of personal and institutional values regarding diversity, including diversity and teamwork, diversity and customer service, and other business related topics.
- Hold a faculty meeting to share how commitment to diversity is incorporated in teaching, research and service.
- Create a music exchange activity to encourage sharing of cultural heritage through song and dance.
- Hold a preventive maintenance workshop to explore varieties of conflict, individual expectations and responses to conflict and diversity-related nuances in preventing and resolving issues.
- Conduct a field trip to explore a museum, monument, neighborhood, or geographic location associated with a specific culture or significant historic inter-cultural event.
- As a group, attend a presentation by a speaker on diversity and hold a subsequent guided group discussion and exchange of viewpoints on the topic.
- Nominate a group or team members for Champion of Diversity (application/pdf, 632.6 kB, info) pins.
- Hold a departmental poster or art exhibit on a diversity theme, with original works by departmental members.
- Share and discuss poetry from different cultures during a department gathering.
- Slide show of faculty or staff visiting another country and share about the people and culture encountered.
- Hold meetings where an employee fluent in another language can teach a few words and phrases.
- Intradepartmental search to identify cultural uniqueness about others with whom you work. Gather to share information.
- Names are often a link to a person's culture and background. At a staff meeting, ask all present to share the story of their name, who (if anyone) they were named for and the background that they know about their last name.
- Take photos of your diverse staff or clients and enlarge them to 8x10" at a self-service photo-enlargement machine. Hang them on your walls to reflect the wonderful diversity of your office.
- Ask your students or staff to tell a story from one side of their family or the other that has been handed down and probably changed many times.
- Visit campus Registered Campus Organizations at the Office of Student Relations web site.
