Diversity Leadership:  Community Resources Fair--Equity and Access in Action

Opportunity:  In January of 2014, I reached out to Oliver Smith.  Oliver was the Bloomington Police Department's Community Liasion.  We'd met at a previous function and had agreed to get together to find some ways in which we could collaborate.  Oliver and I got together to discuss and brainstorm.  A large part of Oliver's role was to form connections within the community.  We landed on the idea of leveraging our many relationships within human services, government, non-profit, and school organizations to create a Community Resource Fair for Metro South ABE students.

Challenges:  Our primary challenge was time.  We wanted to align our event with the registration season for preschool, summer youth sports, and adult enrichment classes.  It wouldn't help people to meet these different organizations, only to be told that they would have to wait some period of time to take part in their programs.  We identified late February as the best time to hold our event.

This meant contacting, briefing, and securing commitments from twenty-some different organizations within a five-week time period.  We used a Google sheet to allow us to work together on this.

We also need to educate Metro South's 225 daytime students about the event, what each of the organizations participating in had to offer, and provide them with materials to help them navigate the event (both literally and figuratively!).  Towards this end, I prepared a flyer that had a brief explaination of each group, contact information for them, and a map of where each group's table would be during the event.

I visited each class the week before the event, talking about who would be there, what they had to offer, and providing copies of the handout.  Several teachers created English lessons around the handout to further prepare their students.  Night and weekend students were invited and given the same handouts.

Outcome:  The Community Resources Fair was a great success!  Over 150 students participated.  All of our partner organizations were thrilled with the opportunity to meet so many of the people they strive to serve.  An unexpected outcome of the event was all of the networking that our partners were able to do--it was a such a wonderful opportunity for everyone involved.  Many students let me know how valuable the event was to them.  As the year went by, I kept getting hearing great stories about kids in swimming lessons, trips to libraries, healthcare successes, etc.

Our success has led to this being an annual event at Metro South.  The concept has been expanded to other BPS buildings and incorporated into PTA functions, Family STAR Univeristy events, and high-school career fair events.