Equity & Inclusion Team
Equity & Inclusion Team
Join us! First Friday of the Month @ 8:30 AM
Following the Rotary Four-Way Test, we provide opportunities for ourselves, our Club, and our community to learn, reflect, grow, and deepen our understanding in order to cultivate greater equity, inclusion and diversity.
We accomplish this through:
1. Engaging in learning, listening, dialogue and reflection.
We have sponsored book club discussions, identified speakers for our Club’s weekly meetings, engaged in living room conversations on a variety of topics, and promoted participation in Braver Angels programming.
We have organized field trips to the MN History Theatre for a program on photographer Gordon Parks and to Big River Farms to learn how Hmong, African Americans and others are learning business models for their farming efforts.
2. Establishing Rotary and community partnerships and collaborations to provide meaningful service, outreach, and engagement opportunities for our members.
We developed a partnership with Willow Lane School to work with 4th grade students learning about service and giving back. Through the Minnow Tank project, 22 Rotarians and friends served as coaches, judges, and sponsors as small groups of students created proposals for funding of charitable projects. Together with our Rotary Community Service and Vocational Teams, we raised $2,200 that was distributed to three “winning” projects.
We are a member of Many Faces of the White Bear Lake Area and work with its 20+ members in sponsoring educational programs to help create a community where all believe they are welcomed and belong.
Club members have found volunteer opportunities at Solid Ground, working with families who are experiencing homelessness, and with the Community Resource Center to provide overnight assistance at their Hugo Family Shelter.
Along with Many Faces, we sponsored an exhibition and programs at the White Bear Center for the Arts by AHHA!, a group of Black artists. Along with a nationally recognized historian, the artists shared with members of the White Bear Lake community how their art expresses their lived experiences, an opportunity to “heal the breech.”We raised $9,000 from the community to match $6,000 in White Bear Lake Rotary funds for WE SEE EACH OTHER. Grants were given to the White Bear Lake Area and Mahtomedi School Districts, to be used by their media centers to expand their existing collections of books reflecting the increasing diversity of the student population and to provide stipends to bring authors to visit these schools to interact with students and teachers.
3. Strategically growing the membership of our Club to reflect the demographics of the community we serve.
Working with other Rotary service teams, we will expand our outreach in the community to better understand the demographics of the White Bear Lake area and to help guide new member recruitment and onboarding.