September 7, 2022 Breakfast Meeting Notes
Guests: Steve DeMaris from Amherst and Greg England (Greg is the Plymouth trails council person who spoke to us last year)
Fifty-fifty was won by Braden, who donated it to Tom
The opportunity to draw for the card game went to Beth, but she did not draw the ace of spades and the game continues
Tony presented the ever-popular New Hampshire trivia.
Announcements:
- Steve noted that the Penny Sale lists are done but he is still working on written instructions. The lists will show the last 3 years of donations and donors can give a product or service for the Penny Sale or a cash donation. If people want their lists before Steve has prepared the instructions they should let him know.
- Braden read a thank-you note to the club from Alex Ray for our support of the Ukrainian relief project.
- The New Hampshire Food Bank will be doing a food distribution this Monday, September 12, from 10 to 2 at Polar Caves. Volunteers needed!
Our speaker today was Alberto Ramos, the Chief Diversity Officer of PSU’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Social Justice.
Mr. Ramos began the talk by giving a land acknowledgement, noting that the land on which PSU and Plymouth sit were the homelands of displaced native tribes. He also shared pronouns (he/him) and noted that current college generation is accustomed to doing this. Sharing pronouns means that people don’t have to assume that they know the person’s preferences based on their appearance or behavior.
His goals were to define a variety of relevant terms and have each of us to identify one action step that we can take to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in our community. He stressed that the discussions need to be respectful and that we need to push our own boundaries to the point that we may feel uncomfortable. We should expect that we will not have closure from this discussion and know when we need to step up and when to step back. We need to strive for humility and look at the big picture, not individual anecdotes. Our own experiences will inform our thinking and we need to be honest and vulnerable.
Definitions:
- Diversity: acceptance and respect that each individual is unique. This year 14% of students at PSU are people of color.
- Equity: process of creating equitable power, access and outcomes for different people. He presented an illustration of the difference between equality and equity with a drawing of three people trying to watch a ball game from behind a fence Equality means giving each of them the same size milk crate to stand on, even though the tallest person didn’t need one at all and the shortest person still can’t see even with the crate. Equity means that the tallest person may not need a crate at all, while the shortest person needs to have 2 crates to get the same height and view.
- Inclusion: the process of bringing traditionally excluded groups, authentically, into the process and power structure.
- Belonging: ties the above three together to engage the full potential of individuals.
Equity plus inclusion without diversity leads to a lot of people thinking the same way.
Inclusion plus diversity without equity leads to the dominant ideology overruling the others.
Equity plus diversity without inclusion leads to people feeling that they need to change who they are in order to belong.
- Social justice is the vision of a society in which resources are distributed equitably. Justice would get at the root causes of inequity (ie, the fence in the above example) rather than just the “fixes” we try to apply to it 9the milk crates).
- Ally: is someone with power and privilege due to their identity who stands in support of marginalized groups. You cannot declare yourself to be an ally; only a member of the marginalized group can identify you as such.
- Bias: Refers to attitudes and stereotypes. Bias may be explicit (in which case the person is aware of it) or implicit (the biased person does not realize his or her own bias).
He then asked us to have a short discussion at our tables on what we found familiar about his talk and what we had learned. He left us with the request that we each think of one thing we can do to fostering an inclusive community. Alex suggested that referring to a group of people as “folks” rather than as “guys” would be a start.
Folks who would like to view the entire presentation can use this link to go to Mike's recording:
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary
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