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:

Shelley Butler on behalf of the Beloved Community Staff Team

Two years ago, the Library and Bookstall Team, with the Beloved Community Staff Team, produced the "Anti-racism Collection" within Unity libraries. This list makes it easier to identify titles that speak to strengthening our anti-racism commitment and multicultural awareness. There are now nearly 180 books and links to online sources in that collection, including Bryan Stevenson's Ted Talk, "We Need to Talk About an Injustice." More recently, we created another collection called "Creative Writers of Color," which already has nearly 100 books. To access these collections, visit https://www.librarycat.org/lib/UnityChurch.
 
Two of the more recent titles are Diane Wilson's Beloved Child and Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys. Diane Wilson spoke about her new book, and her well-received earlier title, Spirit Car, at The Gathering retreat on January 25, 2020. The Nickel Boys is the Unity Church 2020 Congregation Read. There will be two opportunities to discuss this important and challenging book:  Sunday, February 23, at 12:30 p.m., and/or Wednesday, February 26, at 7:15 p.m. (both discussions will be held at Unity Church).

Mary Pickard on behalf of the Beloved Community Staff Team

We’re on a journey to becoming a multicultural anti-racist community. What’s the path, you ask? How do we actually do this as a congregation? What, exactly, are we being called to do? Those are some of the questions that arise as we commit to this journey.

Unity’s Board of Trustees developed the current Ends Statements (https://www.unityunitarian.org/values-mission-ends.html) over a five-month intensive discernment process involving the entire church community. Two of our 2018-2023 Unity Ends Statements commit us to:

• End 1: Create a multicultural spiritual home built on authentic relationships.
• End 7: Create brave space for racial healing and dismantling dominant culture. 

These are our hopes and dreams — our shared ministry — and they come from a sincere desire to see change. Aspiring to change is a good start, but it is not sufficient. 

The Executive Team was charged with setting and measuring concrete strategies for all the Ends Statements. As one example, the Religious Education Ministry Team is conducting an extensive evaluation of the R.E. curricula with the goal of situating our UU faith in multiculturalism. Another is to strengthen small group ministry opportunities with intentional emphasis on cultural identity. 

But are we individually prepared to do the work? What cultural lens will each of us bring to this? How will we build a common understanding of our approach? That’s why the strategies for achieving our Ends Statements contain a healthy dose of training and coaching — but not the kind of diversity training so many of us have experienced in the past. 
Unity Church is taking a different approach, based on the IDI – the Intercultural Development Inventory. Those who developed the IDI define intercultural competence as “the capability to accurately understand and adapt behavior to cultural difference and commonality.” 

“It’s the most widely used assessment tool of intercultural competence,” according to Rev. KP Hong. “The IDI has been rigorously tested, with validation from extensive social science as a reliable measure of intercultural competence across cultures. It invites us to better understand and grow our own multicultural competence — both as individuals and as a congregation.” 
Taking the online IDI assessment gives us a sense of our intercultural capacity. With coaching, we can create action plans that will help us develop the skills to bridge across differences. KP is quick to note there is no one path or simple formula, “We have to be willing to fail, as failure attests to the credibility of our work. That’s how we learn and move forward. That’s where humility comes in.” 

Unity Church is working with Team Dynamics on our journey. I have worked with them, using the IDI, at a nonprofit where I am a volunteer board member. This nonprofit has seen significant changes in human resources and benefits policies, grant guidelines and processes, candidate search and hiring practices. It is sometimes difficult, messy and discouraging. It is sometimes exciting, adventuresome, and satisfying. It is always filled with curiosity, growth, and care for each other. 

Thanks to the Helener Currier Endowment for Racial Justice at Unity Church, the IDI and follow-up coaching sessions are being offered to religious education teachers, pastoral care team members, worship associates, welcome team members, Obama School volunteers, and other key ministry groups. Those who participate can receive a confidential, individualized coaching session to help design a personal action plan. In addition, each team will be given a group profile and coaching to create action plans to help move the congregation toward achievement of its hopes and dreams for the Beloved Community. 

If you aren’t in any of these groups and are not personally contacted to take the IDI, but wish to participate, you are welcome to do so! To inquire or sign up, please contact Drew Danielson at drew@unityunitarian.org, who is administering the process. 

For more information:

• IDI, LLC: https://idiinventory.com/
• Team Dynamics: https://teamdynamicsmn.com
  Check out the podcast “BEHAVE – Episode 1917” for why they use a “developmental approach” to trainings.

I got the call a few months ago, a request from Unity Church to share my experience working with Team Dynamics. They were being considered as a potential partner in intercultural development for Unity as an organization and as a congregation. I remember tripping over my words in the voicemail left in response, excited about what a great match this would be.
 
Team Dynamics, founded by Trina Olson and Alfonso Wenker, was indeed hired by Unity. They have been working with the Beloved Community Staff Team for the past few months on an ambitious initiative: to grow the effectiveness of Unity Church in achieving our Ends Statements by growing our individual and collective ability to recognize and bridge the “differences that make a difference.”
 
On Saturday, September 7, more than 150 people gathered from strategic ministry areas for a multicultural training event with Team Dynamics. Trina and Alfonso were joined by their colleagues Tyrai Bronson-Pruitt and Levi Weinhagen, and shared core concepts intended to spark new thinking and new ways of living our values and intentions (please see links below to handouts and resources). Together, the group got grounded in its understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how certain differences – race, gender, class, immigration status, sexual orientation, ability, and more – make a real difference in how we engage with one another and the life outcomes we experience.
 
The group applied its learnings and insights to their experience at Unity, recognizing that good intentions have not necessarily had the desired effect – whether that be, for example, in ensuring that longstanding members of color at Unity Church feel a sense of belonging, welcoming new visitors to the church, or maintaining authentic relationships with the broader community through our outreach efforts.
 
Already, new questions are being asked by those who participated – questions that will shape how the congregation pursues its Ends. The work done by the group to apply learnings to Unity’s education, worship, community outreach, board governance, and welcome team efforts will continue as long as participants rely on their new learnings as guiding touchpoints.
 
And I can tell you, from my own experience over the past few years working with Team Dynamics at the organization I lead (the American Institute of Architects – Minnesota), that success in bridging difference and achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion goals hinges on each of us being open to personal and organizational transformation.
 
It’s about more than new terms and skills; it’s about a new humility and a new curiosity about the effects of our thinking and our actions. The more we individually and collectively pursue a cycle of learn-try-fail, then learn and try anew, the closer we will get to creating the church community, and the world community, we seek to make real. 

Handouts and resources from Team Dynamics are intended for use as part of ongoing work with TD, who encourage sharing materials with conversation partners.

• House of Intersectionality
• Role Goal Soul
• Worksheet: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
• Worksheet: Elements of Culture
• Worksheet: Target, Agent + Dominant, Non-Dominant

From Erika Sanders, 
Beloved Community Staff Team

In order to fulfill one of Unity’s new Ends Statements, to “Create a multicultural spiritual home built on authentic relationships,” the church has engaged outside help! We’re delighted to be working with Team Dynamics, a firm of consultants guiding us through processes of deep discernment and groundbreaking work. 

First, Team Dynamics is working with church congregants and staff to investigate our current culture, including potential points of bias, resistance to change, and exclusivity. Team Dynamics created an inventory of our policies, communications, and other information about us, in order to assess our day-to-day patterns of awareness and behaviors. 

Next, Unity Church and Team Dynamics will work together to co-design a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Roadmap in support of our End Statements. Why diversity, equity and inclusion, you ask? The three key components shaping the roadmap are distinct and work in concert:

Diversity – a fact of human difference, not an outcome 
Equity – recognition that one-size-fits-all solutions do not work for everybody
Inclusion – different people get to contribute and make decisions in ways that may change systems

Creating the DEI Roadmap involves defining our vision for the future; clarifying our values; determining shared, measurable goals centered on bridging across “differences that make a difference” (such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, and more); and engaging a greater diversity of perspectives. In Team Dynamic’s words, the DEI Roadmap will help us “slow down and really consider the difference between what we know, what we think we know, and where we are just guessing.”

The Roadmap will work in concert with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Unity has used the IDI developmental model in recent years to expand our ability to understand and work across cultural difference. The IDI model offers practical guidance on how organizations and individuals can improve their intercultural competence, and grow along a continuum. 
Finally, Team Dynamics will support Unity in building its capacity to reach its goals, and will give us guided opportunities to try out new practices and reflect on what we are learning. These opportunities will include retreats, learning seminars, and practice sessions. 

Unity’s Beloved Community Staff Team will work to ensure that these opportunities for growth are integrated into all areas of church ministry — for example, in worship, community outreach, welcome teams, religious education, and communications. 
Questions about this exciting work? Contact Rev. KP Hong, Director of Religious Education, at kp@unityunitarian.org.