Executive Update
ASA Initiatives Aim to Foster Diversity in Aging
By GLORIA CAVANAUGH
ASA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
My column in the July/August Aging Today focused on one of the key strategies in the American Society on Aging's (ASA) new strategic plan, which began to be implemented this October. Many readers responded enthusiastically to the subject of that article, the National Learning and Resource Center on Aging, embracing it as an idea whose time had come and strongly endorsing ASA's leadership in this professional education and training initiative. This strategic-plan objective and others I will detail in later columns are vital strands in the tapestry that ASA will weave over the next three years.
However, to create a whole fabric, we need the cross threads that run through all of our activities and programs and that hold us together as an association and as a community in aging. One of these threads--and one of our key strategies--is diversity.
CONCERTED EFFORTS
ASA's diversity activities involve concerted efforts to bring the issues of people of color, differently abled people, gays and lesbians, and other groups excluded from the societal mainstream into the center of our concerns. Fostering diversity means creating an organization in which all members feel welcome, feel that they can bring who they are to the table without leaving their identities at the door. It also means sharing ASA's experience with our members through the range of our educational and community-building activities.
For five years, ASA has been quietly conducting an experiment in building ethnic minority leadership both within the organization and throughout the field of aging. Dave Baldridge, executive director of the National Indian Council on Aging and an ASA board member, recently called our New Ventures in Leadership (NVL) program ASA's "diamond in the rough." We feel the time is right to bring our best kept secret to light and to let it shine.
Sustained by modest grants from five or six foundations each year, along with fees paid by some organizations that have used the program to promote their own diversity initiatives, NVL has turned out, year after year, classes of 15 to 20 new leaders in aging from African American, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian communities. In Cleveland, for example, where The Cleveland Foundation has funded three partners in the program for each of the past five years, there is now a cadre of New Ventures alumni who meet regularly to share information and expertise and provide a support system for each other.
The graduation ceremony for the New Ventures class of 1997 this past August in New York reminded me once again of just how important this program is--to the participants, to their agencies and to ASA. One graduate after another stepped to the podium to emotionally describe how she or he had grown in the course of the one-year program. My heart swelled with pride as these 20 incredible women and men completed an experience that would always be with them. They expressed the feeling that they were part of a new community that would support and sustain them as they recommitted themselves to serving the needs of elders of color.
It is important, though, that we not become complacent about this program, outstanding as it is. For one thing, the scale of the program is too small. We reach relatively few communities around the United States, and hardly any of the larger agencies working in the field take advantage of the program to develop the leadership capacities of their own ethnic minority staff. For New Ventures to achieve its potential, it has to grow. Everyone should know about it. At the same time, we need to find ways to continue to involve New Ventures alumni in the ongoing activities and leadership of ASA. Both of these objectives will be vigorously pursued in the next 12 months.
DIVERSITY AUDIT
NVL is only one of the diversity initiatives at the heart of ASA's new strategic plan. For the past three years, we have conducted an annual diversity audit of the association. This Diversity Impact Report has grown to examine diversity issues in leadership, staff, publications and conference activities. In the most recent period, it has become a tool for all of ASA's governance--our board of directors, standing committees, and the leadership bodies of our forums and networks--to make their memberships and programmatic activities more inclusive.
Another key initiative is our Serving Elders of Color Networking and Training Initiative. Funded with a two-year grant from the Retirement Research Foundation, this project has recently completed a research phase to establish benchmarks for diversity within the field of aging. We plan to provide readers of Aging Today with some of the important findings from this research in the near future. For now it might interest you to know that while most agencies surveyed are in the initial stages of improving their governance relative to elders of color, very few have met their objectives.
Moving into its second phase, the Serving Elders of Color project will be developing curriculum materials, building a cadre of diversity trainers and holding free workshops around the country on understanding and promoting diversity. One spin-off of our continuing efforts will be a new ASA network for professionals addressing diversity in their field of aging. This network will generate a newsletter and opportunities for dialogue on the issues.
We invite you to join us in making diversity an underlying theme in everything that ASA does. Please let us know what we are doing well in this area and where we need to improve. And spread the word about New Ventures in Leadership. This is a program we should all be helping to build.
For more information about ASA's diversity programs, contact Carmelita Tursi, manager of diversity programs, at (415) 974-9630. *
American Society on Aging
833 Market St., Suite 511
San Francisco, CA 94103
www.asaging.org
info@asa.asaging.org