Glencoe Community Readiness Assessment
December 2022/January 2023
Social sectors in your community
University of Minnesota Extension developed the Welcoming Communities Assessment to better understand the challenges and successes of both organizational and community-led efforts to be inclusive of all residents. To learn how welcoming or inclusive a community is, we ask questions about seven overlapping social sectors:
School system
Health care system
Law enforcement
Local government
Non-profit (includes social services organizations, service clubs, and local foundations)
Religious organizations
Business community/chamber
As these sectors experience and adapt to change differently, we want to understand how each sector addresses inclusion.
Assessment questions
Click on the buttons below to complete the assessment survey. We encourage you to complete the short surveys for as many of the sectors as you wish. You don't have to be an employee or have a formal relationship with the sector in order to share your opinions! Each survey should only take about 5 minutes of your time.
Please complete your assessment(s) by Friday, January 27!
Glossary of terms
To ensure we're all on the same page, we’d like to offer definitions for terms used in our reflection questions:
Inclusion. Creating spaces to grow as individuals, sectors and community through sharing, learning, collaboration and action to unite people and remove barriers to equal opportunity and responsibility in community and life.
While our focus for this project is on inclusion based on race or immigrant status, we are not exclusively focusing on race, because we know that race intersects with other ways of excluding based on gender, disability status, income/class, religion or sexual orientation/identity.
Exclusion. Exclusion is the opposite of inclusion. It is the intended or unintended acts that prevent people from participating fully in or feeling a sense of belonging to our community.
Lived experience. Lived experience refers to the first-hand accounts and impressions of living as a person who has been underrepresented or excluded from participation in activities or from feeling a sense of belonging.
Equality. Treating everyone the same. This seems like a good idea, but it only works if everyone started at the same place.
Equity. Ensuring everyone has what they need to be successful — that there are policies, practices and procedures in place to promote equitable outcomes.
Racism. We aren’t just talking about individual acts of bigotry, we are talking about policies and practices that allow inequity. Sometimes we aren’t aware that policies or practices can promote this lack of fairness.
Next steps
University of Minnesota Extension will evaluate the responses from the assessment and we will share our findings in March 2023.
Questions?
If you have questions about this assessment, please contact Scott Chazdon, Extension evaluation and research specialist by phone 612-624-0982 or email schazdon@umn.edu.