By Peter Heege
​The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), developed by Mitchell R. Hammer, professor of international peace and conflict resolution at American University, assesses intercultural competence as the capability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities. To help us grow our ability to be an anti-racist, multicultural spiritual community, a number of key ministry groups at Unity Church are being invited to take the IDI. The sessions are also available to individual congregants. In the February issue of commUNITY, Mary Pickard discussed how Unity hopes to use the IDI. This article expands on that with an introduction to our three IDI qualified administrators and the role they will play.

Our Qualified IDI Administrators 

​Betsy Hearn is a lifelong learner who actively pursues opportunities to grow as a human.  She is a learning and development professional with experience across the non-profit, higher education and corporate worlds.  She has worked in leadership development, organizational development and diversity and inclusion for the past thirty years.  She has been an IDI qualified administrator since 2017 and has facilitated workshops, debriefs and coaching for individuals to understand the benefit from the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI).

My name is Kelley Nelson and I am a member of Unity Church and qualified IDI administrator.  I am excited to offer you the opportunity to take the IDI assessment and receive feedback from me over the next few months as we work together to become even more effective in our cross-cultural work.  Here is a little bit about myself:
 
Kelley Winchester Nelson has spent her career advocating for educational equity and developing cultural competency in a myriad of settings and diverse circumstances.  Upon graduating Cum Laude from Colby College with a BA in Sociology and a minor in Women's Studies, Kelley spent seven years with The Steppingstone Foundation in Boston recruiting, preparing and supporting youth from under-resourced communities as they applied to and matriculated from top independent schools in the area.  Kelley served as a teacher, advocate, and cultural broker working with families to identify their educational goals and finding the right match in academically rigorous, though predominantly white and upper class, private schools, while simultaneously challenging those schools to change their cultures and environment to be truly diverse and welcoming spaces.  When her family relocated to the Twin Cities, Kelley joined The Blake School's lead administrative team as the Co-Director of the Center for Diversity creating change from within at a prestigious independent school.  It was there that in 2006, Kelley became a qualified Intercultural Development Inventory administrator and became a student of the developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.  Kelley has since applied her knowledge and expertise in the development of cultural competency coupled with a deep understanding of white privilege, power, and oppression, in work with teachers and students in St. Paul Public Schools, the East Metro Integration District, and currently in her roles with several youth development programs in the Twin Cities

​Tim Wendt is an experienced HR professional with experience working with executive leaders in the corporate environment.  He helped to lead executives at a Fortune 500 company through a cultural competence journey that led to the organization developing a cultural competence and DEI roadmap.  With more than 30 years of human resources experience he brings both breadth and depth to corporate and DEI initiatives. He is an IDI qualified administrator and has facilitated hundreds of workshops for thousands of employees.  
 

The Nickel Boys by Colton Whitehead
Doubleday, 2019
By Shelley Butler
 
Before I even ordered a copy of The Nickel Boys, I read its many accolades: longlisted for the National Book Award, Kirkus Award-winner, National Book Critics Circle Book Award finalist, one of the Top Ten Books of the year of Time magazine, New York Times bestseller (of course), and great book reviews. They had me at the National Book Award but this one stood out to me the most: “A necessary read.” — President Barack Obama
 
The “Nickel boys” refers to a group of boys in, and later survivors of, a horrifying fictional reform school in Florida. We meet Elwood in the early 1960s at the home of his grandmother, who is raising him. He is an earnest boy with plans to go to the local black college, and he is discovering hope and power through the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Through no fault of his own, he is arrested and sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reform school for boys as young as five years old, with no fixed term of detention. Boys are supposed to be educated, earn their way up a ladder of good deeds to get out, and turned back into the world as good men. Elwood soon learns that Nickel is as abusive, corrupt, and criminal a place as could possibly exist.
 
The “reform school” is segregated, but Whitehead makes clear that being white doesn’t give you much, if any, advantage at a place like this.
 
The Nickel Boys doesn’t take you into this house of horrors for no reason. Elwood sees and experiences some of the worst of it, but still hangs on to King’s message of maintaining dignity against all odds, and especially his words, “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner is of an opposite point of view, just trying to stay alive and out of trouble in any way he can. The story revolves around the two points of view and the events that lead them to a startling conclusion. The reader will have to decide for themselves if either of them, or if both of them, is right.
 
And if you think by the end of the book that a place like this could not exist in the United States in our lifetimes, think again. This story was based on the traumatizing, life-altering true experiences at Dozier Academy. That it operated for 111 years and only closed in 2011 is only part of the anguish. The true stories of the “White House Boys,” survivors of the violence, tell of beatings so severe that some boys were beaten to death. The institution didn’t keep records of everyone who died there, some of whom were buried in unmarked graves. A team of forensic anthropologists began an investigation into deaths at the school, and the unmarked graves, and uncovered more and more bodies. The whole truth of the place may never be known.
 
How does this happen? Why were reports of abuse over the past 60 years not taken more seriously, the perpetrators of violence not brought to justice, and the institution closed? I think Whitehead’s point is that it did happen, and present-day America is not without its own versions of Nickel/Dozier boys cruelty.
 
When this title was recommended to the Beloved Community Staff Team, the Library and Bookstall Team, and the Racial and Restorative Justice Team, co-sponsors of the 2020 Unity Church Congregation Read, we all agreed it was a good choice. Books are for sale in the Unity Bookstall and a limited number to check out from the Anderson Library.
 
Please join the book discussions coming up on Sunday, February 23, at 12:30 p.m. and/or Wellspring Wednesday, February 26, at 7:15 p.m. Haven’t read or finished it yet? Come anyway — these are sure to be thought-provoking, maybe even action-provoking discussions.

Friday, February 14 • 7:00 p.m. • Robbins Parlor
A documentary about cultural survival and stolen children, Dawnland takes the viewer inside the truth and reconciliation commission for Native Americans. This film was awarded an Emmy for outstanding research in 2019. 

Wellspring Wednesday presentation, January 28, 2020
By Merrill Aldrich, Unity Church Member
​
Tracing the genesis and the effects of structural racism can be arduous and labor intensive work. Recently, Kirsten Delegard, director of the Mapping Prejudice Project at the University of Minnesota shared with us a glimpse of the data, visualizations, painstaking research and personal anecdotes that she and her colleagues have combined to tell the sad history of racial covenants in the Twin Cities.

Racial covenants were real estate contracts -- clauses inserted into warranty deeds--used by real estate developers and agents to enforce unlawful segregation and prevent people of color from buying or occupying property. With geographic maps, showing specific blocks and years, the Mapping Prejudice project details the areas of Hennepin County where segregation was reinforced by these clauses in property deeds that reserved land and structures for white people. The maps are backed by exhaustive research into the title history of lots where phrases prohibited the sale, using a variety of terms, to non-whites.

Delegard’s personal interest in this subject came from several generations of her family living in Minneapolis, and a discomfort with what she described as “the dissonance” she observed in the lore of her home town. A certain set of mythologies we have in the twin cities about civic virtue, with stories like Hubert Humphrey’s efforts to end racial segregation and Walter Mondale’s Fair Housing Act, while true, seemed to her to obscure other narratives that are explicitly racist and should be told. She “resolved to lead my home town through a process of remembering” by reconstructing the history of racial covenants and their effect in creating de facto segregation in Minneapolis.

If you missed this talk, much of the content is available in the film Jim Crow of the North, available to stream online.

Volunteer Opportunity
Because of the nature of the source data for the Hennepin County mapping project, a large contingent of crowd-sourced volunteers came together to review the historical deed documents. Almost 3,000 volunteers read about 177,000 deed-related documents to compile the data. Coming up in a few weeks -- specific date TBD -- the project will formally expand to enable volunteers to gather this data for Ramsey County, including Saint Paul. We’d like to encourage anyone at Unity with an interest in this work to pitch in and assist in expanding the map. To find out more, sign up to receive the Mapping Prejudice Project electronic newsletter (scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the "Stay connected with Mapping Prejudice" box).

​

By Merrill Aldrich, Unity Church Member

Each Sunday our worship at Unity Church opens with a reference to “the Beloved Community we seek to make real.” With Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday just past, I have been trying to further educate myself about this term and this work that so many people and organizations continue since King’s death. “Beloved Community” has historical roots, an interpretation that Dr. King extended and popularized, and, I have learned, a history within our own institution since at least 2005, and within the UUA.
 
From both religious and philosophical threads, Dr. King shaped the idea of “Beloved Community” throughout his life into a clear vision that people could actively work toward. He prompted us to work to create a society that embodies principles and practices of mutual respect, support, integration, difference, nonviolence, and economic equality. King insisted that this goal was for this world, not the next, and we could work together toward creating it, here and now.
 
At Unity Church, Beloved Community was invoked as an official term in 2005, when the board of trustees reframed “moral ownership,” one of the institution’s policies as follows: