Red Deer’s Community Informed Diversity + Inclusion Plan
The following nine priorities were developed from engagement with diverse and marginalized community members in Red Deer. They represent a beginning point for action to enhance community wellbeing through increasing equitable access and celebrating diversity. The expectation is that City staff and leaders, and community organizations and members, will collaborate together and assume joint responsibility for progressing actions which address these priorities. This will be done in an equitable way, recognizing that the City has more access to structural power and the resources needed to mobilize these actions, and that marginalized communities have more insight into which actions will provide an effective outcome. It is recommended that a Diversity and Inclusion Framework will be developed to expand on and further plan to address these priorities and recommendations.
Priority One: Address Mistreatment in Communities, Workplace and Education Systems
1. Develop a hate and discrimination response model for the city, including bystander behaviours and responses.
2. Work with school boards to track and respond to experiences of discrimination and mistreatment against marginalized people in education.
3. Create more opportunities for English language training, as well as opportunities to learn to embrace and support speakers of English with diverse accents and for whom English is not a native or first language.
4. Encourage the enforcement and enhancement of employment policies and standards that address mistreatment and inequity in the workplace.
5. Reduce barriers to gaining employment for marginalized groups by increasing knowledge and education among recruiters and employers, and encouraging the adoption of best practices to end discriminatory in hiring processes.
6. Lead with hiring diversity, valuing divergent perspectives and appropriately responding to cultural communication and work ethic differences in workplaces.
7. Provide more opportunities for business training, education and support for historically marginalized people struggling to access the labour market.
8. Review bylaws and develop and implement programs which reduce the mistreatment of people experiencing houselessness, homelessness and addictions in the community and when accessing services and healthcare.
9. Work with policing and extremist prevention groups such as the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee and the Organization for the Prevention of Violence to understand the factors causing vulnerability to recruitment into hate-based organizations and develop an action plan to prevent this.
10. Provide resources to the Welcoming and Inclusive Community Network to generate educational opportunities for programs such as Radicalization Leading to Violence.
11. Recognizing the value of addressing the unique context and needs of Indigenous people specifically, create pathways for interaction and collaboration between efforts to improve Indigenous people specifically, create pathways for interaction and collaboration between efforts to improve Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, and broader Diversity and Inclusion.
Priority Two: Address Inequity
12. Increase and grow relationships, connections and representation from members of Indigenous communities, and members with intersecting identities from historically marginalized communities in decision-making and program development that impact their wellbeing, access and participation.
13. Encourage and incentivize marginalized communities to evaluate how they are responding to the needs of the even more marginalized people within their communities (e.g. 2LGBTQ+, disabled, women, etc.) by linking this value to funding and program development
14. Facilitate increased representation of marginalized people on council committees, community boards, service club memberships, and other similar structures
15. Challenge ‘tokenism’ by recruiting for multiple representatives from historically marginalized communities, encourage their relationship-building with each other, and plan to support their needs.
16. Include a diversity of organizations represented in engagement and partnerships, and grow this network.
17. Partner with marginalized communities and voices in the development and implementation of initiatives and programs.
18. Increase diversity in hiring, beginning with employment with the City.
19. When hiring, value Indigenous knowledge and lived experience, and lived experience of inequity, alongside or instead of educational experience; and create preferences for these experiences.
20. Explore and promote ways to recognize value in qualifications from other countries that are not currently validated by the Canadian system.
21. Address dominant culture advantage in interviews.