DIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT LATIN AMERICAN WORKERS

MISSISSIPPI SOUTH CAROLINA

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THE DIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT PROJECT

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University created the Diversity Advancement Project to engage the public on the importance of diversity. The Center for Social Inclusion is a project partner and acts as the project coordinator.

Racial, ethnic and gender diversity is critical to our nation’s global competitiveness, national security and to our personal and community development. Diversity makes our communities healthier and secures a safer, stronger and more harmonious America . Race and gender-conscious policies are essential to ensure the diversity necessary to build the most talented student bodies, workforce, and citizenry.

Our public conversation on “diversity” is polarized around whether or not affirmative action is fair. It rarely includes discussion of what we mean by “diversity,” and why we need our public and private institutions to be racially, ethnically and gender diverse. The Project defines “diversity” as the end of structural discrimination and racial and gender disparities. The result of diversity includes access to opportunities for all. Diversity is a vehicle to ensure fairness -- dismantling privileges extended to a precious few and taken for granted, and the racial and gender hierarchies it produces. Diversity is more than the presence of some non-white faces in a classroom or on a jobsite. It requires a critical mass of people of color and women to enable them to influence the way an institution is structured and how it does its work.

The Project is developing a positive frame within which we can understand and discuss structural diversity. From this frame the Project is developing tools for communities and organizations to promote a more robust and healthy public dialogue around diversity and affirmative action programs and policies to achieve diversity.

Project activities:

• Convenings of academics and advocates on race and opportunity to develop frames for diversity and public education and communications strategies ;

• Development of tools and other materials to disseminate frames, messages and public education products; and

• Development of materials grassroots groups and other pro-diversity advocates can use.

Please visit The Project's Website at: www.diversityadvancementproject.org