by Cynthia Price
Legal News
The West Michigan business and legal communities currently appear united around the value of working to eliminate racism and its negative impacts.
But as noted during the recent Grand Rapids Bar Diversity Roundtable (see Grand Rapids Legal News, March 17, 2010), the overriding question is how.
The Partnership for a Racism Free Community (PRFC) thinks it has some answers.
The movement to eliminate racism in Grand Rapids and environs needed to be kicked up to the next level, according to survey responses from participants in the 2005 Racial Justice Summit, hosted by Grand Rapids Area Center for Ecumenism (GRACE).
The PRFC was born.
Faye Richardson-Green, Director of Global Learning and Development at Steelcase, Inc., says that in 2006 she volunteered to take on the challenge of developing activities to move toward a racism-free Grand Rapids.“We needed to find some way to guide organizations in a structured manner to this racism-free place.”
Thinking the process would take just a few months, the committee Faye led began with definitions and indicators. “We were literally starting with a blank sheet of paper.”
Synapses started firing, and the idea of certification came up. In 2007, the group asked for organizations to volunteer as part of a pilot program, to refine the processes and tools the group had started to develop. “They hung in there with us while we worked through the process,” Richardson-Green says.
The Standards and Credentialing Committee — Richardson-Green and many others — came up with an in-depth assessment process and methods to review companies and organizations who might want to be certified. Kathy Glynn, another Steelcase employee, now chairs the committee. The members decided to set various levels of
certification: provisional partnership, full partnership and credentialed
partnership.
Various entities involved in the original pilot program officially went through the certification process in 2009. When all was said and done, only one Grand Rapids organization achieved Full Partner status, and that was law firm Warner Norcross and Judd LLP (WNJ).
The designation came as part of a morning-long forum at the Kent Community Church held by GRACE, which still sponsors the PRFC. Approximately 300 people in attendance heard Rodney Martin, WNJ’s Diversity Partner, thank the Standards and Credentialing Committee for helping the law firm pull together all the threads of what it is doing and a plan to do more.
“I will admit that I was very nervous when I met with the credentialing team – I prepared as if I were going to court that day,” Martin confessed to the crowd. “But the survey team quickly put me at ease; this was intended to be a conversation, not an inquisition.”
Camp Tall Turf, Calvin College, and the YWCA achieved provisional partnership status.
WNJ has developed a three-year plan in its quest to be, ultimately, a Credentialed Partner, but Martin later said WNJ had already benefited greatly. The “very good” process, he said, was conducted in three phases: the first was to respond to each of the PRFC criteria and indicate whether or not the firm met those criteria; the second was to supply documentation that supported its claims; and the third was a visit from and in-depth interview with a three-person review team. “It was a good process for us because it actually required us to put our heads together and go through systematically and look at what we’re doing,” Martin said.
Shortly after the partnerships were announced, forum participants were treated to a keynote by Victor Lee Lewis, national speaker and movie star of sorts.
Lewis appears in The Color of Fear, a 1994 documentary which brought together eight men of different ethnicities for a weekend to discuss racism and the forms bigotry takes post-civil-rights-movement.
Consultant and Grand Rapids Community College instructor Ken Taber, who introduced Lewis, had incorporated The Color of Fear in curriculum he developed for the local Institute for Healing Racism. Many in the room had seen the documentary.
Lewis, as hard-hitting a speaker as he was in the film, nonetheless thanked the participants. “I want to honor you and your love and your courage. The courage you have expressed thus far in your life and the courage that lies within you that is yet untapped as well.” He jumped down off the podium and circulated in the audience as he asked people to respond honestly to clips from the film.
Richardson-Green made remarks before Taber’s introduction of Lewis, and asked participants to raise their hands if they had been hurt by racism. Seeing that the majority of hands raised belonged to people of color, she commented, “But really 100% of you have been hurt by racism, some just more directly than others.” Lewis said he was in complete agreement, and since the film has dedicated his life to helping people understand that.
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