Diversity Summit 2019

Description

Diversity Summit 2019
 
The Diversity Roundtable, of Greater Lafayette Commerce, presents the bi-annual Diversity Summit with the theme being ?Discussing Whiteness?.  In a polarized national climate where there are ?us versus them? views, it is necessary to engage in conversations that lead to better understanding and healthy discussions on and across difference.  This year?s summit will provide space for a conversation of this nature to take place in an environment that is engaging and conducive to learning.
 
This year?s Keynote Speaker is Mr. Bryant K. Smith.  Mr. Smith is President and Founder of Smith Consulting And Networking, a comprehensive consulting firm that helps businesses and schools to reduce anxiety, increase productivity, and foster the growth and development of culturally competent and confident leaders and managers. For more than two decades, Mr. Smith has consistently been able to provide his clients with immediately actionable steps and strategies that create cohesion amongst groups and teams, reduce conflicts around issues of difference and enhance individuals? abilities to be great global citizens. Mr. Smith also serves as the Editor -in-Chief of the My Click Urban (MCU) Voice, which is the news and narrative platform of My Click Urban app and site, the best mobile solution for people who live, work and want to connect with urban lifestyles. When how it?s said is just as important as what is said, you want Bryant K. Smith to say it. 
 
Mr. Smith will also facilitate a workshop for all participants:
 
?Eyeglass Equity: Beyond Seeing Through the Lenses of White Supremacy, Privilege, and Racism?
  
This workshop is a multimedia experience whereby attendees will examine whiteness through several different lenses with the goal of changing how we see, engage and respond to whiteness. The session is designed to engage the audience in a series of critical thinking activities which will help them strategize on how whiteness is granted, how it creates power dynamics between and within marginalized groups, reinforces stereotypes, creates and maintains privilege, and promotes the ideology of White Supremacy. The workshop will conclude by helping attendees develop ten immediately actionable steps to recognize and counter the negative impact of whiteness in their personal, professional, and educational environments. 

Additional Workshop Offerings:

1. Whiteness in Education: A Guided Discussion on Learning Whiteness
    Led by Christopher D. Munt.

Christopher is a local diversity and inclusion practitioner with more than a decade of professional experience in corporate, community and higher ed settings.   Christopher serves on the steering team for Conversation Circles- an initiative of the Greater Lafayette Commerce's Diversity Roundtable.

2. Whiteness in Policing and Law Enforcement
    Led by Dr. Warren Dukes.  

Dr. Warren Dukes? current research focus explores the importance of ethnic-identification in the context of work environments.   This new research approach synthesizes race-consciousness theory with strain theory to evaluate the significance of race in police organizational cultures, and minority officer?s response levels.

3. Whiteness in Community/Community Organizations
    Led by Lacey Davidson.

Lacy is a community organizer with the Younger Womxn's Task Force of Greater Lafayette and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue.  Her academic work focuses on account of rasicm, individual and collective accountability for racism. 

4.  Conversations about Race and Privilege
     Led by Reverend Rodney Lynch and Barbara Kerkhoff. 

Rodney is a co-facilitator of Greater lafayette Commerce, Diversity Roundtable.  He has led "Conversations about Race and Privilege" throughout the community.  Rev. Lyunch brings over 20 years of prophetic ministry experience to the community.

Barbara is a co-facilitator of Greater Lafayette Commerce's Diversity Roundtable's Conversations Circle Initiative.  She is trained to faciliate the Transforming White Privilege curriculum reacently developed by Racial Equity Tools.  Her studies include a Bachelor in Social Work degree from Virginia State University, Mastor of Pastoral Studies and Mastor of Divinity degrees from Loyola Unviersity Chicago.

Workshops are first come first serve.  If your first choice is full, we will place you in your second choice and so on.