LAKE COUNTY— The Countywide Community Visioning Forum Planning Committee (CVFPC) met again on Monday to promote tolerance, respect, equity and inclusion in Lake County, through their livestream for June. The county’s consultant for diversity said six additional meetings are planned.
Community members and leaders from the County of Lake including the cities of Lakeport and Clearlake and tribal governments that resonated with the Board of Supervisors’ unanimous equity proclamation following the social unrest of 2020, volunteered to be a part of this effort and once again met virtually to discuss among other items: focusing resources on underlying causes and conditions that lead to inequitable resource and justice distribution and relevant solutions for any social injustices, as they may come to light.
The Lake County BOS at their March 15, 2022 meeting approved a $33,000 contract for consultant Nicole Anderson, founder and CEO of Nicole Anderson and Associates, tasked with helping the county facilitate “community vision forums” to promote these goals of inclusion. The contract also calls for both the City of Lakeport and Clearlake to pitch in a collective $10,500 (The County is footing the rest of the cost at $22,500.)
“As we move towards growth, we’re learning how to be okay with discomfort, meaning that people have different truths,” said Anderson adding that this is a time where diversity is very much a culture from a national and political perspective. “This is going to be challenging because as you move the work forward, you may notice whenever there’s an advancement for any groups that have been oppressed or marginalized, you’re always going to have pushback and some level of resistance,” said Anderson, adding that they approach the work through understanding people’s differences and different perspectives on their own truths.
“As leaders, how do we respond to that right and get ready for that work? These agreements are something you want to establish early on, especially with those that are on board with you, because you want to create the conditions to sustain this work and that’s what is powerful about creating agreements, and going back to them, especially because things change over time. We’re just meeting today, but we have six meetings coming up. We want to create the conditions to sustain this work through this committee,” added Anderson.
Anderson said that relationships are one of the main things that is talked about when they try to do this type of work. “How do we connect to other human beings who may be different from us, and ultimately create that connection through storytelling, which is a cultural nuance? I don’t know too many people that don’t have a story. None of us are ever an expert at educating people, but we do want to feel comfortable speaking on issues that people may be resistant to,” added Anderson.
According to Dr. Shelley Jones-Holt, anti-racism educator, founder and CEO of Leadership Legacy Consulting, LLC and Family Legacy 5, we’re very technically minded. “This is adaptive work. You are shifting mindsets and perspectives, helping people to see the world in a different way. Oftentimes we see the world like this: Through our own lens with blinders. I think about horses. The reason they put on blinders is so they don’t get distracted. We have a lot of people that are walking through the world like ‘my truth is the truth’, as opposed to being mine. We start removing those blinders,” she said.
“The minute you remove blinders from a horse, typically they tend to go nuts. They’ve never had this peripheral vision. They panic… ‘What is this? What are you doing? Put my blinders back on. I’m very comfortable here.’ Those blinders for horses, that have been in them a long time, so that they can get used to, are slowly, but surely, opened up. Same thing when we start shifting people. We’re doing adaptive work. It’s not technical, and ‘slowly, but surely,’ we keep opening up the door, opening up their minds… You don’t change your mind today. It’s not going to happen. There’s a lot of different things that have happened in this country over the last 300 years, even further than that. We talk about the global impact that we have to unpack,” said Jones-Holt.
