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About the Culture Change Initiative

We kicked off this training initiative in January 2020 with a few departments and have expanded our reach by opening our trainings to all City employees. Our goal is for every City employee to have the opportunity to attend our workshops.

These workshops will be repeated monthly, and new ones will be added over the year, so that those who wish to keep building their equity awareness have many opportunities to do so. Since March, due to the pandemic and practicing physical distancing, all of our learning opportunities have shifted to digital trainings for the time being.

The City is partnering with community organizations and members who are leaders in their fields, including the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, to provide high-quality workshops grounded in lived experiences of people who are most impacted by inequity.

In our first year of the initiative we partnered with Dr. Virginia Necochea and trainers associated with the Center for Social Sustainable Systems (CESOSS), a South Valley-based non-profit, RACED consulting, Anti-Racist Youth Leadership Institute (AYLI), Dellsly Group, and other local anti-racist educators while other workshops where facilitated  by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), a national organization that is committed to Undoing Racism©.  Staff from the Office of Equity and Inclusion will co-facilitate and/or lead some of the trainings. This training initiative is funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Read more about the announcement from Mayor Keller linked here.

The training curriculum is listed below.

  • Introduction to Racial Equity
  • Implicit Bias & Creating Change
  • Introduction to Americans with Disabilities Act
  • Working with Diverse Populations Inclusion Series
  • Anti-Racism and Social Justice Book/Article Reading Circle
  • Community Conversations
  • Language Access
  • Lunch Dialogue Series(History, Racial Equity Vocab, and Key Racial Equity Concepts)
  • People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond-Undoing Racism Workshop
  • Reading Data from and Equity Lens
  • Cultural Competence 101
  • Planning & Implementing Culture Change Strategies
  • SAFE ZONE Training
  • LGBTQ and Senior Citizens
  • Civil Rights
  • Fair Housing

Culture Change Report 2021

Culture Change Report 2020