Otto Bremer Helps Promote Inclusive Communities in Southwest Minnesota

The Otto Bremer Foundation, St. Paul, has funded the continuation and expansion of the Southwest Minnesota Foundation's grantmaking efforts around promoting inclusive communities. Otto Bremer's two-year, $100,000 grant will be matched by SWMF, based in Hutchinson.

The promotion of inclusive communities has been a priority for Southwest Minnesota Foundation since 2000. Over the past four years, the foundation has awarded 59 grants totaling more than $600,000 to increase opportunities for people of color to participate in their communities. Most of those grants were related to community cultural celebrations, diversity trainings, or projects that focused on welcoming and integrating new immigrant populations.

"These efforts have been positive, necessary steps toward creating more culturally competent policies and practices," said Jay Kieft, SWMF program officer. "Through this partnership with Bremer, we now have the opportunity to be even more strategic and, ultimately, more impactful in our efforts to promote inclusive communities."

SWMF intends to use the additional funding from Otto Bremer to create partnerships with community groups throughout southwest Minnesota that will build on "best practices" or research-based projects to promote inclusive communities, strengthen diversity and build cultural competence. Several studies commissioned and funded by SWMF will form the basis for these projects.

According to SWMF, the need to create culturally competent communities is growing. From 1990 to 2000, 14 of 18 counties in the southwest region of Minnesota have experienced increases in their minority population of between 50 and 500 percent, and the number of new immigrants continues to increase. Southwest Minnesota is home to almost a third of the rural communities statewide that are experiencing growth of more than 100 percent in their populations of color.

"As southwest Minnesota communities grow in their diversity, SWMF, in partnership with the Otto Bremer Foundation, can lead the way in assuring that they have quality support that lifts them toward cultural competence," said Kieft.

SWMF will focus its grantmaking toward building cultural competence around five essential elements:

• Valuing diversity - accepting, respecting and celebrating differences.
• Developing capacity for self-assessment - knowing your own (or dominant) culture and its impact on others.
• Building consciousness of the "dynamics" inherent when cultures interact - recognizing the history between cultures and heading intentionally toward healing.
• Institutionalizing cultural knowledge - applying cultural knowledge to all parts of a system.
• Developing adaptations to service delivery reflecting and understanding the diversity between and within cultures.

"This grant gives the Otto Bremer Foundation the opportunity to share its vision and mission with the SWMF," said Elsa Vega-Perez, senior program officer for Otto Bremer Foundation. "The SWMF has the reputation and the expertise on bringing rural communities together. We're glad to have a chance to participate in this effort that will increase the civic engagement of new Americans in our rural communities."

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