[Grad-Cap Icon] Training

The 1-day Building Inclusive Communities (BIC) Workshop is designed to provide a framework for participants to take personal responsibility for creating a truly engaged diverse and inclusive campus environment and to stay current with the diversity, equity and inclusion needs and issues of a changing population base and VCU community.The BIC workshop can help us learn an approach to continually recognize and examine the impact of our own biased assumptions and perceptions and to overcome obstacles to becoming culturally competent leaders and making sustainable systemic change. This evidence-based workshop is comprehensive and focuses on learning from information presented and by experience, changing behaviors, and group and organizational dynamics/outcomes. The program design will address the specific content and examples brought to the session by the VCU participants. The key workshop components are: Creating a safe, non-blaming learning environment; shared assumptions and definitions; four levels of analysis concept (personal, interpersonal, cultural, institutional); tools for collaboration and cooperative communication, problem-solving and trust building; understanding the concept of historically included or privileged and excluded or discounted group memberships and identities, and the impact of those societal dynamics on the function and success of teams and relationships; developing participants` skills to address the attitudes, pitfalls and conditions (often unconscious and unintentional) that perpetuate disparities in power and access (Modern `Ism and Internalized Oppression Theory), opportunities for practical applications and problem-solving with the training tools at the individual, team, organizational and systemic levels. Together we can develop a culturally informed VCU community that empowers each of us to strengthen communication and effectively address the needs of diverse groups.