Pre-Gathering Course

Developing Critical Cultural Competency

Thursday, January 12, 2017  8:30 AM - 5:00 PM

“A Process for Creating Equitable Social Change with Courage, Resistance and Action"

Trainers:  Robette Dias and Joy Bailey, CrossRoads

This course is being brought to you by the organization Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training.  They were founded by Executive Director Emeritus Rev. Joseph Barndt and Rev. Susan Birkelo to develop new directions in understanding and combating the root causes of institutional racism.  Since 1986 Crossroads has been providing organizing, training, and consulting to institutions striving to dismantle racism. They also strive to build anti-racist multicultural diversity within institutions and communities.  The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA-USA) has partnered with Crossroads on initiatives.

Fundamental to this course is the understanding that there exists a dominant culture and subordinated cultures in the United States, with significant imbalances of power between them. The dominant cultural group has created institutional structures that reflect its standard for what is correct, normal and good. The aim of this training is to equip participants to name and interrupt these dominant cultural dynamics.  They emphasize the connections between cultural difference and racism as a systemic, institutional problem of power and create the rationale for focusing on racism as a structural barrier to institutional inclusion and equity.

At this course, we will define culture and the problem of dominant culture, explore the Center/Borderlands Power Arrangement, and reveal the peculiar role of race and racism in the arrangement.  You will learn new tools for interrupting the Power Arrangement. You'll understand the continuum on becoming an anti-racist multicultural institution and learn to live transforming values - an antidote to dominant culture values.

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