On today’s #NPCOMM Chat Live, Antionette Kerr and I talked about creating a Judgement-Free Zone or Circle of Trust around cultural competency for nonprofit communications directors, or as we are calling it Inclusive Conversations.
First of all, we need a better name for this concept that doesn’t conjure up fitness center commercials or Robert DeNiro forcing you out “Meet the Fockers” style. Feel free to help us rename it in the comments!
By names aside, what we hope to do with the Inclusive Conversations webinar series is to create opportunities for you to ask questions and get advice in a safe space. This series is NOT about telling you all the things you are doing wrong, leaving you paralyzed in fear about saying the wrong thing. Antionette and I both know what it feels like to want to do the right thing but to be lectured to the point that you are afraid to even try.
Instead, we want to equip you with ways to produce better, more inclusive communications for your nonprofit. We also want to help prepare you to lead the sometimes hard conversations within your organizations about how you talk and write about people who are culturally different from you.
In today’s Facebook Live, we talked about our intentions for this series, and also got specific about language choices like Merry Christmas, bad neighborhoods, at-risk youth, and marginalized communities. We talked openly about the real challenges that nonprofit communicators face, including in fundraising appeals. How do you give the donor a problem to solve without describing the people who need help in uncomfortable or demeaning ways?
You can watch the replay here, and feel free to add comments. We can keep the conversation going even after the live show is over.
We launch the webinar series on Thursday with “Don’t Call Them That . . . Language That Divides.”
And seriously, if you have something better than “Circle of Trust” or “Judgement Free Zone,” please share in the comments!
