ENGAGING DIVERSITY IN A ONCE-HOMOGENEOUS CITY
As Dubuque, Iowa’s economy shifted, so too did its demographics, giving rise to tensions. The D5 Coalition sat down with Nancy Van Milligen of the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque to learn about how the Foundation responded with actions to encourage inclusivity and celebrate diversity — and in doing so, maintain the promise that comes with both.
This story is from the annual D5 State of the Work report.
Dubuque, the oldest city in Iowa, has traditionally been a German- and Irish-American community, rich in ethnic subcultures but very — in a word — white. It did not experience the civil rights movement in the way Northeastern and Southern cities did, and it’s had a troubled not-so-distant past when it comes to diversity. In 1989, a cross burning made national news. A subsequent plan to encourage 100 black families to move to the city turned into a scarring experience when the families were met with more cross burnings: good intentions swept away by ugly undercurrents.
But the city is changing, and not just economically, as factories and farms give way to a more diverse economy. African Americans now make up 5 percent of the city’s population (up from 1.2 percent in 2000), and Latinos make up 2.4 percent (up from 1.6 percent). Yet these groups are struggling: The black poverty rate is 52.5 percent and the Latino rate 39.8 percent.
In 2009, the city succeeded in attracting an IBM Innovation Center, which moved into part of the historic Roshek Building (an architectural gem that was once a department store) and provided 1,300 new jobs. That brought a new wave of diverse workers to the city — plus some fresh tensions, says Nancy Van Milligen, president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, which also occupies part of the Roshek Building. Word started to trickle out about racial incidents targeting some of the new workers.
“Change is hard,” Van Milligen says. “It was time to reflect and see how equitable and inclusive our community is.”
The result was Inclusive Dubuque, a venture that brought together leaders from faith, education, business, nonprofit, and government organizations — from the NAACP to the Dubuque Museum of Art to John Deere to local universities.
Inclusive Dubuque is housed in the offices of the Community Foundation, whose board oversees it. “We staff and facilitate it,” Van Milligen says. Rather than create a 501(c)3, it opted to create a network and use a “collective impact” model of intervention.
Going deep into equity and diversity can be a hard sell, Van Milligen says.
“When I first brought the idea of Inclusive Dubuque to my board of directors, they were concerned,” she says. “They said, ‘These problems will never go away, progress won’t be measurable, and some of our donors won’t like it’.” But they turned around: “Two years into the project, I had unanimous support that this was the most important work for us to do as a community foundation. The board had become aware that equity was core to all of the issues they were working on–academic success, poverty, and family economic security and workforce.”
“It was time to reflect and see how equitable and inclusive our community is.”
Skeptics on the board and elsewhere came around, she says, as the local hunger for this kind of work became apparent, accompanied by a steady drip of national stories about rifts over race, immigration, and inequality.
The Foundation gave $5.8 million in grants in 2014, but much of its work involves convening and coordinating the region’s philanthropic community, engaging donors, and hosting pilot projects. Eventually, over 50 groups would join the Inclusive Dubuque network, which was launched in February 2013 in the Grand River Convention Center overlooking the Mississippi River. Mayor Roy D. Buol was on hand to pledge commitment to the cause.
Throughout 2015, Inclusive Dubuque organized a series of community dialogues on such topics as economic well-being, housing, health, education, neighborhood safety, transportation, and the arts — one theme per month — and commissioned short preliminary reports, called Snapshots, on these topics. Two dozen trained facilitators led 60 sessions that reached some 600 people. Nearly 2,000 citizens submitted online surveys. (Not bad for a city of 60,000!)
The sessions were demographically diverse, with black residents turning out in especially large numbers, double their proportion of the population (11.5 percent of the total). Special efforts were made to reach out to marginalized groups like city’s population of Marshall Islanders. And when Inclusive Dubuque held its own monthly meetings, it was “the most diverse table in Dubuque,” says Van Milligen.
At dialogues on the city’s economic health convened by Inclusive Dubuque, residents spoke up about the difficulty of finding work and the challenges of finding reliable transportation to those jobs. And they expressed a more general lament: To many, Dubuque can appear to be a city of closed networks that non-mainstream residents can’t penetrate.
At the dialogues on education, one particular issue leapt out: Very few black students were making it into algebra classes in ninth grade, which can push them off the college track.
Given how diversity is new for some residents of this 90-percent-white city, some of the progress that Van Milligen reports may seem like obvious steps to residents of more rainbow-hued locales. She recalls one partner organization realizing it had never included minority residents in its press material; it began to do so. In another important, incremental gesture, the local development group now includes in public spaces educational displays about some of the holidays its diverse workforce celebrates.
Inclusive Dubuque also includes more substantial endeavors. The Foundation is making sure that its own programs have a strong diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) component. It’s working with the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation and area educators, for example, to identify and train unemployed and underemployed workers — among whom minorities are overrepresented — for advanced manufacturing programs. The result: 331 workers showed up at the program’s orientation, 153 enrolled in training, and 93 percent of those who completed training are now employed.
“Our community is resource-rich. We have strong nonprofits with the capacity for making change. How can we connect the dots better?”
There’s also Re-engage Dubuque, in which “coaches” reach out to young people ages 16 to 21 who have dropped out of school — another problem that disproportionately affects minority students. The coaches find them by looking at dropout lists, surfing Facebook, and dropping by fast-food restaurants to chat up people behind the counters. More than 200 students have been reconnected to education opportunities, with more than 60 completing diplomas or high school equivalent degrees in the last two years. In September, John Deere cooperated with the Multicultural Family Center for a “teen night,” during which employees shared information about careers in welding assembly, and instrumentation.
Van Milligen says, “The Community Foundation functions as the backbone organization for these initiatives by providing continuous communication, tracking the measurable outcomes, and holding the players accountable.”
Building on the dialogues and the monthly “Snapshots” of data, survey results, and citizen comments, Inclusive Dubuque shared a summary of the Community Equity Profile in Fall 2015. Since then, working groups have formed around each topic area to identify priorities, and engage partners and programs that can affect change.
Van Milligen says: “Our community is resource-rich. We have strong nonprofits with the capacity for making change. How can we connect the dots better?”
The initiative faces a number of challenges, among them, political passions stirred up by immigration and other issues. “It’s a lot easier to work on early childhood reading than it is to work on race and equity,” Van Milligen says.
“I think to do this work you have to really know yourself and to really understand your own biases — and we all have them — and work on that,” she says. “So, yes, it has been eye-opening.” Among the goals set was diversifying the foundation’s board. “We knew that was an important area to address so we set specific goals, which we were able to achieve this year.”
The challenge is worth it, Van Milligen insists: “In a town like ours, these would be the kind of issues where if you didn’t want to talk about them, you wouldn’t have to. So why are we talking about it? Because it couldn’t be more important.”
Authored by Chris Shea
Read more stories from the movement to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in D5’s State of the Work report.
