About
What is Inclusive Moorhead
A project of Resilient Moorhead, Inclusive Moorhead is a network of people working together to improve social and racial equity. To be resilient, a community has to have a high degree of equity, ensuring that all residents have the resources needed to thrive even when circumstances are challenging. And the community needs the talents and strengths of all residents! The more people can meaningfully participate in civic life, the stronger the community will be.
In 2021, Resilient Moorhead contracted with UBUNTU Consulting, led by Laetitia Mizero Hellerud, to conduct an extensive set of listening sessions with members of marginalized communities in Moorhead. The next step was to move from the report to action. To do this, we engaged the services of Karen Pifher’s Creating Community Consulting. Out of this work, in 2022, emerged Inclusive Moorhead, a community-wide network.
Inclusive Moorhead recognizes all of the good things about Moorhead and the efforts by many to create a welcoming, inclusive, and equitable community. We seek to build on strengths and to assist those in leadership positions in moving forward in commitments to advance social and racial equity in our community.
Our Approach
Building community resilience starts with identifying who is most impacted by poor living and social conditions and who is marginalized. Local data and the “Social and Racial Equity Study” (Ubuntu, 2022) showed glaring health and wellness disparities across under-represented populations. Inclusive Moorhead was developed as a collective effort to understand and respond to those disparities by engaging with people most impacted by the conditions to develop collaborative solutions. Using a result-focused, strength-based, and data-driven approach informed by the social and racial equity study, key strategies have been developed.
Strategies are organized into four areas of work:
Relationship Building
Build diverse relationships between people and organizations across class, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status gender, and ability.
Policy & Process
Improve policy and processes that ensure inclusive decision making in any space (group, organization, business, governmental).
Formal Representation
Improve inclusive representation and/or processes with elected leadership spaces.
Community Education
Improve community education to build individual skills and knowledge to enhance inclusivity.