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 coming Together for Racial Understanding

Coming Together for Racial Understanding (CTRU), seeded by the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy in 2016, has a vision to grow a community of Extension professionals well prepared to foster meaningful community conversations around race, leading to positive change. The foundation of the effort is built upon four major principles:

  • Cooperative Extension Service (CES) is positioned to help organize and facilitate these challenging conversations, as they are viewed as trusted resources in some communities*.

  • CES must demonstrate in our own practices what we seek for communities.

  • CES must do our own work around race before we can effectively engage communities.

  • Dialogues are vital to understanding, and understanding is vital to healing and enduring change.

CTRU embraces these principles by first identifying and training core state teams. To date, this training has taken the form of two weeklong face-to-face workshops (2018 and 2019) with a total of 26 states participating. State train-thetrainer teams consisted of three individuals with a strong foundation in one or both content circles described under what training entails. These core teams then lead two additional phases:

  • Build capacity within the CES system in the home state through training a larger cohort of CES professionals, ensuring racial/ethnic diversity of the participants. Where applicable, this means working across the state’s LGU systems where applicable (1862, 1890, 1994).

  • Facilitate community dialogues within the state. These processes are typically spread out over 6-7 weeks meeting once a week, using one of two science-based community dialogue processes that culminate in informed community action: o Facing Racism in a Diverse Nation o Coming Together for Racial Healing

For more information, please contact:

Crystal Tyler-Mackey, PhD

Extension Leader, Inclusion and Diversity Specialist, Community Viability

Virginia Cooperative Extension

Dept. of Agricultural, Leadership and Community Education

cmtyler@vt.edu  804.955.9271