Community Foundation of Johnson County creating diversity training for nonprofits

The Community Foundation of Johnson County is working with the cities of Iowa City and North Liberty to create a diversity, equity and inclusion training program for nonprofit organizations in the county.

“We have such a variety of organizations serving the same clients. Someone who’s coming into the food pantry might also be receiving support in finding housing, support in workforce training,” said Ellie Moore, the foundation’s vice president for community impact and outreach. “So doing a training where everyone has common language and is on the same page about what that needs to look like moving forward feels like a good place to start.”

The idea for the training came from a grant application cycle the foundation held last fall. The foundation has an inclusive Johnson County fund — which anyone can donate to — that is used to aid projects related to equity and inclusion in the nonprofit sector. The foundation invited organizations to send in applications for funding.

Several organizations sought funding to create diversity, equity and inclusion training — either for staff, board members or volunteers.

“Rather than give out a bunch of $1000 grants so everyone could do their own insular trainings, we thought, we’ll grant some other projects — we ended up making eight grants at about $20,000 — and then hold off on those DEI applications for training,” Moore said.

The foundation reached out to Iowa City and North Liberty in order to pool resources and start to design a training that could be shared among the organizations that had applied for training funds. Moore said the foundation felt it especially needed the help of experts in the Iowa City Office of Equity and Human Rights.

“We knew we needed to call on the cities because they have content experts. … Iowa City delivers a lot of trainings around equity and access, for a lot of different types of providers or people,” Moore said.

As part of the process of designing the training, the foundation has reached out to various nonprofits in Johnson County and asked them to fill out a survey about their interest in the training. The survey asked organizations to identify what they would like to get out of such a training and what formats they would prefer to see.

Moore said the training likely will be a three- or four-session series later this year and could become an annual training, depending on the response. She said she anticipates about 30 organizations will participate in the initial training this year.

“My assumption is at the very least we’ll have some common language around how we talk about equity, inclusion and access. We’ll have some cultural competency pieces built in that are very broad and make sense for everyone to learn about,” Moore said.

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com