Glencoe Community Readiness Assessment

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.