A new program from the University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) aims to help students and area residents get along together in an increasingly diverse community.
The Diversity Community Outreach program offers a wide variety of educational services aimed at fostering understanding among people of different cultures, races, social and economic classes, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs.
The outreach effort will be led by Walter Fisher of Morris, a longtime educator and counselor. Fisher will do public speaking and diversity awareness training for business, law enforcement, students, and community groups. He will also arrange educational programs and provide conflict resolution and mediation services. In addition, Fisher plans to revive Ambassadors for Cultural Exchange, a popular program that, in past years, brought UMM students of color into Morris elementary school classrooms.
The Diversity Community Outreach program grew out of UMM's success in attracting a diverse student body and faculty, says Sandy Olson-Loy, vice-chancellor for student affairs. This year, for example, UMM has 272 students of color, as well as students and teachers from more than two dozen countries around the globe.
This diversity -- rare in rural Minnesota -- enriches both the college and the community, Olson-Loy says. It also creates a need for greater tolerance of people's differences, she says. In recent years, UMM has received an increasing number of requests for "training and speaking on topics relating to diversity." The college, whose mission includes service, asked, "How can we be a resource in this area? How can we bring people together to understand each other?"
In partnership with the Otto Bremer Foundation, UMM created the new Community Diversity Outreach program, which could serve as a model for other small, rural colleges. It's funded by a three-year, $141,000 grant from the Bremer Foundation, which has a strong focus on promoting equality and upholding human rights, says Loren Carr, president of Bremer Bank in Morris. The Foundation's support allows UMM to offer Fisher's services to the community at no charge.
Walter Fisher, 50, has spent a good portion of his professional life helping people better understand one another.
Fisher, who is black, grew up in Chicago, where his late father was a police officer and his mother, now retired, worked in communications. As a child, he was close to his grandparents, Benjamin and Willie Fisher, who were born in rural Mississippi and came to Chicago in the 1920s, raising nine children during the Depression.
"I spent a lot of time with my grandparents because we all lived in the same building with most of my uncles and aunts and cousins." His grandparents were great storytellers, Fisher says, and their stories had an important influence on his career choice: "They taught me the power and importance of people being heard and having a voice."
Fisher graduated from a large urban high school and went on to college at the University of Illinois, where he received a degree in community health education in 1974. As a student, he served in VISTA, working as a case aid in a halfway house for mentally ill adults.
After college, Fisher joined the Illinois Department of Public Health as a venereal disease investigator -- a job that honed his diplomatic skills in a big hurry: "I was one of the people who knocked on the door and asked who you'd had sex with." Later he worked as a health educator for Christian Action Ministry, a Chicago social services agency.
In 1977, Fisher joined the American Cancer Society, where he spent 11 years training volunteers and organizing health education programs in Chicago and New York City. In the late 1980s, Fisher began working with troubled young people as a crisis intervention counselor for New York City Department of Public Health. Later, he coordinated peer education at City University of New York's Hunter College, which has a diverse student body of about 20,000. "It's representative of New York City: a mosaic -- very, very diverse, culturally and in every other way."
For the last eight years, Fisher has been a consultant for the Anti-Defamation League's "A World of Difference Institute," a training program that helps communities and institutions combat racism and bigotry. He has brought the Institute's programs to private and public organizations all over the United States and Europe, including the FBI and the Armed Forces overseas.
Fisher first visited UMM in 1996 to present the Anti-Defamation League's college diversity program, "A Campus of Difference." He's been back every year since to train local student leaders, and last spring, he accepted an offer to join the UMM staff. Olson-Loy says Fisher "is an especially gifted trainer and facilitator. He's been doing this work for many years with people of all ages."
A broad concept of diversity This fall, Fisher began doing diversity awareness education at UMM, where many students -- including minority students -- have grown up in relatively homogeneous communities and have little experience relating to people who are different. Fisher starts with a very broad concept of diversity: "In America, we often understand diversity to mean skin color. But it's much more. For example, it includes culture, sexual orientation, visible and invisible disabilities, appearance, religion, class, political beliefs -- and that's not a complete list."
Building a community that accepts and embraces these many differences requires that all people must be "acknowledged and listened to," Fisher says. "When this happens consistently, we can collaboratively develop an environment that acknowledges and respects us all."
Fisher is also working with city and law enforcement officials, school administrators, and the Morris Human Rights Commission. LeAnn Love, chairman of the Commission, says her group is especially interested in Ambassadors for Cultural Exchange, or ACE.
Organized in 1998 by UMM student Ron Morris, ACE brought students of color into third grade classrooms to read stories about their own cultures. The volunteer program was praised by teachers and kids, but it lapsed after Ron Morris graduated and left the community. Morris teachers have asked that the program be revived.
ACE is just one of the outreach programs Fisher hopes to develop in the next three years. He expects more diversity initiatives to come out of needs identified by local schools and community groups. So far, Fisher says, people seem "interested in what we're doing and willing to tell their stories."
For more information on diversity outreach programs and services, call Fisher at 320-589-6095.
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Last Modified Tuesday, February 01, 2005
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