Diversity Training Part 2

Last month, I offered up some areas that I think are worth focusing on when we plan a diversity training for our staff members. If you have made it here without reading that one by some miracle of an internet search algorithm, I recommend you skim it first to understand some of my definitions, qualifications, and the focus points themselves. Briefly, the focus points were:

1. Focus on your “why.”

2. Focus on being a facilitator.

3. Focus on upgrading skills.

4. Focus beyond one specific identity.

In this blog, my goal is to highlight a training we have been working on here at Camp Onas that emphasizes some of these focus points while also highlighting ways it could improve. This is not designed to be something you can take and implement exactly on your own, but rather a case study that might help you brainstorm new ideas, develop an even richer training for your camp, and help me improve mine.

Focusing on our “why”

Those who know me understand that I am a big believer in the power of a good process. It is paradoxical, but I hold that typically the most important decision is how we make decisions themselves.

This particular training was developed by a group of our summer counselors called the IDEA Advisory Committee. IDEA stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access, and this group of counselors brings a variety of lived and work experiences to the table to help Camp Onas advance its goals of becoming a place where everyone can feel true belonging. Counselors self-select into the committee as one of their specialized work areas and are compensated in the same way other counselors are for their work area. The committee works directly with me so that I can help support and implement their ideas and they can help establish priorities for me to work on as a year-round employee. This has included creating trainings, trying to build affinity spaces, developing my year-round role as the IDEA Coordinator, and formalizes the work they often are doing anyway as members of our staff who their peers often go to for the answers to questions related to diversity.

With a designated time slotted into orientation week for a diversity training, the IDEA team sat down to figure out how to use it best. The training began to take form as these counselors shared what they thought camp, and by extension, its counselors, needed to know and be prepared for before the campers arrived for the summer. This was our emphasis on the first focus point, the shaping of our “why” through data collection. Something I heard a lot from the IDEA team was how tiring it can be for a counselor when their peers regularly need their help to handle certain situations relating to their own identity, leading to burnout from constantly helping other counselors.

So, we identified two key goals for the training. The first was to help counselors be able to identify and stop a situation that could be causing harm, address it fully if they felt able to, and then find appropriate help to follow up as needed. The second was to develop a shared understanding of key concepts among all our staff, examples being performativity, ableist language, microaggressions (a term I’m not in love with anymore, but highlight here because that’s where we were at the time), among many others. 

Focusing on upgrading skills

With these goals in mind, it was time to start thinking about how we would accomplish them. Rather than change people’s minds, which we know is very difficult, we want to focus on upgrading people’s skills to understand some of these identity-based concepts better and be able to stop harmful situations as they arise. 

We settled on talking through practice scenarios as one of the best ways we could give people exposure to difficult situations. Rather than act out the scenarios, we chose talking them through for two reasons:

1. Our staff who do not have the lived experience for a given scenario will be more likely to show up fully to a conversation where they can say something “incorrect” and not have it spiral out of control.

2. Talking about things would be a safer initial step for our staff with lived experience than re-living harmful situations they may have previously encountered. This second point comes from direct experience in previous years where trainers in roleplay scenarios took their job as “instigator” too far and ended up causing harm in the process.

We planned to split our counselors into groups of about 6-8 people across ages, with each group being given one scenario to talk through. After giving groups the time to create a plan of action, we would come back together as a whole staff and each group would present their response to the scenario. Then, everyone else would have the opportunity to ask questions or offer suggestions related to their response. 

Focusing on facilitation

Now that we had our goals and knew how we would target people’s skill-building, it was time to start thinking about who would facilitate this training. I have complete confidence in the members of the IDEA team to be leaders at camp, both in formal and informal settings, so having them lead the training was an option on the table from the start. However, we decided that having five facilitators was a little unwieldy for the space, and no particular member of the team felt strongly that they would like to be the sole or co-facilitator for the training.

In short, the reason was that none of them wanted to do it. There’s a delicate balance to strike in including staff where we want to give them opportunities to be involved and not put the entire effort of the work on them. Helping guide the planning of a training is a lot less work than leading it, and given that I was an eager (if imperfect) potential facilitator, they were comfortable with me stepping into that role. This included the caveat that, should they deem it necessary at any point, a member of the IDEA team could raise their hand during the training and I would give them priority in the speaking order so that they could add their own clarifications or additions to any of the scenarios. 

As a facilitator in a multicultural space talking through these scenarios, it was important I remember my role as a facilitator, not “the” expert. My job was not to personally critique each response and create the director-approved action plan, but rather to give space for everyone to offer their own insights and collectively reach a satisfying solution. Having done this for two years now, I lead each training with the simple sentiment that there is no single best answer to these scenarios. Rather, there are a plurality of possible good outcomes as well as bad ones. We don’t know the perfect response, but together we can identify action plans that will be more helpful than harmful and vice versa. 

Focusing on multiple identities

In order for our training to engage all our staff and not leave anyone feeling scrutinized for the entire time, it was important that we create scenarios that could speak to many different issues that counselors might encounter. This is also critical because it allows people to take space from a particular scenario if it feels too personal without missing the whole training. We expected some of these scenarios to hit close to home because all of them were based on experiences members of the IDEA team or their peers have had at Onas. 

Below are a few examples of scenarios we have used:

• Your bunk is working on a lip sync performance. They’re trying to choreograph a dance and one camper turns to the one Black camper in your bunk and asks “well you could probably teach us something right?”

• During tent clean-up, one of your campers regularly struggles to focus on the task at-hand and the other campers are starting to notice. “Just be helpful for once and not such a spaz,” one of the campers says.

• At your table, a camper has told everyone on the first day that they use they/them pronouns. One camper, however, misgenders them later that day. You correct the camper then, but they do it again the next day.

• During an assembly, you watch as a female CIT asks a group of graduate campers to be role models for younger campers and quiet down. The graduates nod, but quickly after the CIT leaves the male campers roll their eyes and continue to talk. 

• A couple of campers are writing letters together in your bunk. After one of the campers makes a comment on the other’s letter, you hear “ugh don’t be such a grammar Nazi.”

Where we can grow

One of the biggest areas for growth I see in our training at Camp Onas is in making my focus point on examining the intersections of identity a more intentional piece of the program. Right now we include many different topics in our conversations, but we are not always integrating them together. Perhaps this could look like updated scenarios that work around multiple identities, such as ones where the person causing harm holds marginalized identities in addition to the person they are harming. Or, maybe this could be having counselors create specific action plans that more specifically speak to their identity, something that certainly comes up in conversation but is not a formal aspect of our scenario problem-solving.

Another area where I could see this growing is furthering our skills by practicing some of these scenarios through roleplay after the initial discussions. It is critically important that we don’t recreate traumatic incidents in people’s lives for the training benefit of others, but there has to be a middle ground where we can build muscle memory in responding to these regular occurrences without putting an undue burden on our community members who have already been impacted. To be clear, these roleplay scenarios are not potentially harmful because of the fragility of our staff, but rather the occasionally over-zealous nature of those acting as the instigating individual(s). I mention this because, as our experience at Onas attests, we cannot rush into roleplays for things without creating very clear guidelines and boundaries for the trainers to mitigate how overwhelming the “worst case scenario” can become. While it may seem a little silly given the rather basic talk-through example scenarios provided above, when they are played out with further conversation/conflict they can get quite intense.

A third area of improvement would be to create a resource for our staff that contains a glossary of terms and concepts we expect them to have a basic understanding of prior to the training itself. In some previous iterations of the training, we have had huge portions of time be taken up just by collaborative definition-setting which, while it has its merits, is pretty exhausting for those in the room who already have strong content knowledge. This resource, as well, could be referred to throughout the summer as needed by our staff.

Last, speaking of exhausting, I want to talk briefly about how tiring this type of training can be for historically marginalized staff. As I mentioned in Part 1, considering your audience is a key part of any training and we need to take a multifaceted approach towards examining diversity if we want all our staff to be present. However, even when doing so, there are still going to be times (likely many times) when sitting through someone else’s growth on something that feels like a basic part of your life experience is going to be exhausting. And, it can be doubly tiring when their peers rely on them for the “right” answers which requires extra participation. One of the ways our staff is most diverse is in the varied levels of background knowledge when talking about these topics, so the burden of responding to scenarios can quickly default to the person who others assume has this experience. As a guy with basically all the markers of privilege in American society, I don’t have all the answers to this problem, but it is an important site of inquiry for our growth and requires further collaboration.

Those are four of the places I can see this training improving, but there are tons of other things I have not written down, fleshed out, or likely even thought of yet. So, if you’re someone who finds themselves in a similar position as me, I would love to hear your thoughts about what is working well for your camp and how you’re looking to grow, too!

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DEX COEN GILBERT

Assistant Director & Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Coordinator - CAmp onas

TSCS MEMBER

Dex can be reached at dex@camponas.org.