Recent Community Dialogue Hosted by HCEC

From Laurie Markoff

The Holliston Community Education Collaborative (HCEC) hosted a community dialogue on March 7 entitled How to Have Important Conversations with Our Children for Greater Inclusion in Holliston. HCEC is a community partnership that includes Holliston PTO/Mindshare, Holliston Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC), Diverse Holliston, Holliston Youth and Family Services and Holliston Public Schools and is open to all community members.

The focus of HCEC is to provide opportunities to build the capacity of the Holliston community to have open, respectful, and effective dialogue regarding diversity, equity and inclusion related topics in order to develop the culture of Holliston to be more welcoming and inclusive of people from diverse identities, backgrounds and experiences and to cultivate greater multigenerational community connectedness.

At the event, community members met in small groups both in person and on Zoom to discuss the successes and challenges they have encountered in having conversations with young people about diversity, equity and inclusion. In doing this, those in attendance had the opportunity to practice having authentic exchanges about these issues. 

Participants were encouraged to tolerate the discomfort that can arise in these conversations and to be open to learning from one another. Those present were then able to share what they discovered with the entire group about what makes speaking with young people about human differences easier and what makes it more difficult. This was followed by a panel of community members who work with young people reflecting on the important takeaways from the evening as well as on their own experience in having conversations with young people about human differences.

HCEC intends to create an info-graph that will showcase what we are discovering about effective strategies for speaking with young people about issues of diversity, equity and inclusion that will be available to all community members. Diverse Holliston will continue to offer monthly Community Labs in which members practice speaking about these issues as well.  HCEC plans to host a future event in which community members can continue to learn and practice discussing these topics, so that we can become an even more connected and welcoming community. A handout from the event is available at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B4x34zJuY1ZmjQBNA0_sBVEMbrdENz0OnFbRr5l8n2o/edit

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