Library: How-To Tips: Being inclusive by building cultural competence

When you are planning a democratic governance project, it is important to consider the various ways that your efforts can unintentionally exclude people. You should pay particular attention to how the project will reach people of color, recent immigrants, people in poverty, and other people who have felt — or been — excluded from decision-making in the past. This section is intended to provide a framework for thinking about the disconnects between local leaders and culturally diverse populations, and provide specific questions for you to consider.

Many people use the term "cultural competence" to refer to situations where institutions are interacting well with many different kinds of people. One definition of cultural competence is "a group of skills, attitudes, and knowledge that allows people, organizations, and systems to work effectively with diverse racial, ethnic, and social groups." In improving cultural competence, there are three main areas to consider: cultural patterns, inter-personal bias, and institutional equity.

Cultural patterns

In almost every community, there is no longer one single mainstream culture or history. Different groups of people have different histories, customs, philosophies, and styles of language. For some groups, these differences are more entrenched and significant than for others: People who have been on the outside of local politics and public decision-making may have histories and cultural patterns that feel very separate from the rest of the population.

This means that, in order to attract a wide variety of citizens, a democratic governance effort may have to be described in different ways to reach different sets of people. Organizers should always be asking themselves "Are we taking into account the group identity and cultural patterns of all the different kinds of people in this community?" Of course, the best way to ensure that you are addressing this challenge is to have organizers and close allies who belong to the groups you are trying to reach.

Interpersonal bias

Many people do not recognize the key role that subtle bias and prejudice plays in everyday interactions. Often, people of color feel that elected officials, other local leaders, or public employees may be consciously or (more likely) unwittingly affected by prejudice and stereotypes when they interact with people who are unlike themselves. In contrast, people without strong personal ties to historically disadvantaged communities often assume that interpersonal bias plays a very small role in these interactions.

Whether or not you think bias and prejudice affects these interactions is not the main point: the fact is that these perceptions exist, and they have an impact on whether people can communicate and work together. So organizers should ask themselves: "How can the democratic governance effort help people raise and address questions of bias and prejudice?"

Institutional equity

A final question has to do with people's perceptions about how fairly — or unfairly — resources are distributed among different populations in the community. In many cases, local leaders believe that past problems of unfairness have been essentially resolved. Leaders sometimes expect people of color to recognize that, though the community is not perfect, their elected representatives are acting with good intentions.

On the other hand, groups of people who have been excluded in the past may perceive that current arrangements still reflect decades-old patterns of unfairness. They may feel that local government is not sufficiently committed to redressing these concerns. In order to have credibility in many part of the community, local leaders may have to deal with these perceptions about unfairness, both past and present.

[Excerpted from Changing the Way We Govern: Building Democratic Governance in Your Community, National League of Cities Democratic Governance Panel, 2006.]