Intercultural Communication Training for Board and Commission MembersMasterpiece on the Mississippi
Dubuque
hail
All- AmaicaCity
1
2007
TO: The Honorable Mayor and City Council Members
FROM: Michael C. Van Milligen, City Manager
SUBJECT: Safe Community Task Force Recommendation - Intercultural Training for
Board and Commission Members
DATE: December 16, 2010
One Safe Community Task Force recommendation was: "Cultural Competency
Training should be offered periodically to businesses and the community at large. It
should be mandatory for City Board and Commission Members, as well as for City
staff."
The intercultural approach focuses on the point of interaction between two or more
cultures, and improves peoples' skill at predicting misunderstanding and
miscommunication likely to arise because of cultural differences. Intercultural
competency training is mandatory for City staff.
Human Rights Director Kelly Larson is recommending that the City offer Intercultural
Communication Training sessions once per year to City Board and Commission
Members. This would be two 2.5 hour sessions for a total of 5 hours of training. These
are called Intercultural Communication instead of Intercultural Competence because
competence is built over years in a much more intensive program like in the program for
City employees.
It is left up to the City Council if attendance of Board and Commission Members is
required or voluntary. Should it be mandatory, some sanctions would need to be
developed for a person that did not attend.
I concur with the recommendation and respectfully request Mayor and City Council
approval.
MCVM:jh
Attachment
Michael C. Van Milligen
cc: Barry Lindahl, City Attorney
Cindy Steinhauser, Assistant City Manager
Kelly Larson, Human Rights Director
Safe Community Task Force
Masterpiece on the Mississippi
Background
Dubuque
Ititteg
All-America Ci 1y
1 1 1 1 1
2007
December 10, 2010
TO: Michael Van Milligen, City Manager
FROM: Kelly Larson, Human Rights Director
SUBJECT: Safe Community Task Force Recommendation - Intercultural Training for
Board and Commission Members
The purpose of this memorandum is to put forth a staff proposal for implementing the
Safe Community Task Force recommendation that mandatory "cultural competency
training" be provided to all Board and Commission members.
We appreciate the Safe Community Task Force recognizing that human relations skills,
particularly as they relate to the ability to work effectively together across cultural
differences, are critical to creating a safe community. The City of Dubuque has an
Intercultural Competency Training Team that can help build these skills. The team does
not offer "cultural competency" training - which simply provides information about an
individual culture or cultures - but instead provides intercultural training. The
intercultural approach focuses on the point of interaction between two or more cultures,
and improves peoples' skill at predicting misunderstanding and miscommunication likely
to arise because of cultural differences. While it is not realistic to expect people to
become competent in a few hours of training, we do think that there are pieces of our
intercultural training that could be particularly helpful in improving communication across
cultures as people work together on Boards and Commissions.
As a pilot program, we offered three 2.5 -hour sessions focusing on intercultural
communication to the Safe Community Task Force Members, the City Council
Members, and the Human Rights Commissioners (a total of 35 people) over the past
three months. Approximately half of the invitees attended the first session, ten attended
the second session, and six attended the third, with the highest percentage of attendees
at each session being City Council members. Since that time, staff in the Human Rights
Department has evaluated the attendance and feedback in order to set forth an
implementation recommendation.
Recommendation
We recommend that once each year, we offer two, 2.5 -hour intercultural communication
training sessions for Boards and Commission members. Based on our experience:
1. the training should not be referred to as "competence" training because, while the
sessions would provide people some skills to help them work and communicate
more effectively with each other as a group, people will not build "competence" in
the amount of time allocated; and
2. the training should not be referred to as "mandatory" when there is no method in
place to hold volunteers accountable if they decline to attend the sessions.
We make the above recommendations in order to protect the integrity and credibility of
our larger intercultural competence efforts within the organization, which are in fact
designed to build competence over many years. We think that the difficulty we
experienced in getting people to attend the pilot sessions we offered is indicative of
what would happen with other board and commission members simply because the
individuals involved are volunteers. If the public believes the training is required and will
result in competence, they will expect changes in behavior. When those changes do
not occur, people will judge the training as ineffective. Alternatively, if the public were to
learn that people were not "really" required to attend, it would further marginalize those
members of our community who highly value these skills — they may very well interpret
the lack of accountability as confirmation that others do not really understand the
importance of improving our ability to work across cultural differences.
The reality is that true competence is developed over time by people who are motivated
to learn the skills because they understand these abilities as relevant to something that
they themselves are trying to accomplish. If we truly want to encourage competence,
our efforts are best served by focusing on those who are interested in developing these
skills because the skills serve their particular goals and needs. These individuals will
then be able to assist others on their boards and commissions in communicating more
effectively.
cc: Andre Lessears
Molly Menster
Carol Spinoso