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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