Statement on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

For over 20 years, Boys & Girls Club of Missoula County has enabled youth to achieve great futures. We collectively stand for the future of our children, including our children of color who may be filled with fear, resentment, and concern for their standing in society. We stand against racism, discrimination, violence, and all forms of oppression. We stand for safety, health, basic human dignity, and equitable opportunity. Our staff and leadership team are working with intentionality to strengthen anti-racism and anti-hate practices with a zero-tolerance policy. We are making a commitment to engage in specific, relevant training, to create safe spaces to talk about about diversity, equity, and inclusion with our Club Members, and to intentionally diversify the educational programming at our Clubs.

The future of our nation rests in the hands of our youth. Together we have a powerful voice, and as role models for our children, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to seek change on behalf of young people so that great futures for our kids continue to start here at our Missoula County Boys & Girls Clubs.

Our Approach

Our approach focuses on three priority pillars. Each pillar is dependent on the others to support meaningful solutions locally, regionally, and nationally.

People

Ensuring our practices are trauma-informed and youth-centered, that Club Staff are well-trained in anti-racism and equity work, and that our Staff is comprised of diverse individuals representative of the Club Members we serve.

Actions we are currently taking: Our Club Staff opted to extend our monthly all-staff meetings for one year to include a minimum of 30 minutes of training related to trauma-informed best practices and anti-racism and equity work. Since December 2020, we have partnered with EmpowerMT to facilitate this set of trainings each month. Training topics include implicit bias, micro-aggressions, conflict resolution, self-awareness of personal identity and that impact on experiences inside and outside of the workplace, and how to be a good ally. We continue to provide a wide array of training topics related to equity and anti-racism practices at each staff meeting.

Programs

Ensuring our programs are inclusive, culturally relevant, and nurture and elevate youth voice through youth-led and co-created experiences and opportunities.



Actions we are currently taking: We have redesigned our Club schedules to include designated times for intentional DEI-related programs and have partnered with EmpowerMT to deliver these programs. Once a week, EmpowerMT leads DEI programs with our Club Members, supporting all of us in our growth. Additionally, we are working to merge our existing Emotional Wellness program with pertinent DEI topics, allowing for more Club time for our Members and Staff to have these conversations that are so essential to our development. Outside of designated DEI-related programming, we are working to improve the inclusivity, cultural relevancy, and youth voice opportunities in all of our programs and activities at Club. We evaluate our growth in this area using the Weikert Center's Youth Program Quality Initiative through a tailored High Quality Club Experience Observation Tool.

Policies

Ensuring our business policies and practices are high-quality as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion and that youth facing policies support equitable and inclusive programming.

Actions we are currently taking: Our leadership team and Board are continuously conducting an in-depth review of all of our organizational policies through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are also working with our nationals team to compile best practices for ensuring all of our organizational policies and practices are equitable and inclusive.

Further, as part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, the Club has created the following four avenues for affirmative action within their hiring process:

• The SQI committee will monitor employment-related actions monthly to prevent discrimination from occurring or to detect and eliminate it. As part of monitoring efforts, the SQI committee will bi-annually review the Club’s workforce to determine if fewer minority group members are employed than are available in the workforce. If such “underutilization” is discovered, placement goals (targets, not quotas) will be established to encourage and concentrate recruitment and outreach efforts.
• The SQI committee and Leadership Team support efforts to broaden the pool of qualified candidates for job categories in which fewer minority group members are employed than are available in the workforce.
• The Leadership Team will employ, advance in employment, and otherwise treat minority group members, qualified disabled individuals, and protected veterans without discrimination based upon their minority group membership, disability, or veteran’s status in all employment practices.
• The Leadership Team will strongly encourage employees belonging to minority groups to participate in professional development, and to take advantage of mentoring, additional projects, and promotional opportunities.

Finally, upon hiring, starting pay wage will be decided upon and offered collectively by the Leadership Team, generally from within the starting wage range, specific to individuals, based on longevity, previous experience, and education level.

Anti- Discrimination Policies

BGCM is committed to the future of our children, including our Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx (BIPOC) and LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Two- spirit, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, A-gender, Bi-gender, Gender Queer, Pansexual, Pangender, and Gender Variant) children who may be filled with fear, resentment, and concern for their standing in society. We stand

against racism, discrimination, violence, and all forms of oppression. We stand for safety, health, basic human dignity, and equitable opportunity.

As youth development professionals we therefore promote social justice through intentionally strengthening anti-racism and anti-hate practices with a zero-tolerance policy that disrupts systems of oppression. In keeping with these efforts, we have developed a set of anti-descrimination principles to guide the core functions of the Club. We recognize this document to be organic and open to change

based upon our evolving understanding of these issues as informed by the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Finally, we recognize the important and impactful ways that oppressions overlap and interact with each other. Therefore, our anti descrimiation practice will take an intersectional approach to systems change (i.e. we will consider how racism, sexism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, ableism, ageism, classism, colonization and systems of patriarchy interact and use that understanding to create practices, policies and procedures that eliminate those conditions).

The Club will use our position, resources, and relationships towards efforts that seek to dismantle

systemic descrimiation by committing to:

Develop, improve and evaluate comprehensive plans to increase the diversity of our staff.

• Evaluating recruitment and retention practices to determine the extent to which these efforts result in representation of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ staff that mirrors the demographics of the communities we serve. We will use evaluation findings to create actionable plans that increase diversity.
• Ensure all staff, internship, and volunteer placements are committed to anti-racism, anti-oppression and LGBTQ affirming practices.

Infuse anti-descrimiation pedagogy into our curriculum and curriculum delivery.

• Evaluating the extent to which the Club’s curriculum includes content on historic and contemporary descrimination, decolonizing, and anti-descrimination practices.
• Staff will work to adopt and expand anti-descrimination pedagogy across all programs as well as intentionally diversifying the educational programming at our Clubs.
• Create environments where forms of descrimination can be identified and challenged while maintaining an emotionally-safe place for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ Club Members.

Actively work to build our anti-descrimination literacy.

• Build the breadth and depth of knowledge on systemic descrimination among faculty and staff by participating in yearly anti-descrimination training and ongoing workshops with particular attention paid to understanding the history of descrimination in the United States, colonization, white supremacy, contemporary dynamics of race in our country, and intersectionality. Training content will build over time to ensure continual growth of knowledge.
• Create regular opportunities for staff to consult on how to respond and disrupt microaggressions that occur in the Club, where the responsibility of that response is on the Club staff and not BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students.

Ensure all formal and informal Club policies and procedures are anchored in anti-discriminatory practice.

• Review policies (internal operations, handbooks and informal practices) to determine opportunity to infuse language that results in anti-descrimination practices.
• Create measures and systems of accountability to ensure our anti-descrimination principles are meaningfully adopted into practice.
• Center the voices of individuals who identify as BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ to inform evaluation and accountability processes.
• Institutionalize restorative justice processes as an option for acknowledging harm caused in the Club as a result of microaggressions, conflict, and other forms of misconduct. Restorative justice provides an opportunity for Club Members, families, and staff to come together to explore harm and needs, obligations, and necessary engagement. To the extent possible we will embody restorative justice in all of our practices.

*Throughout this document we use the term Black, Indigenous, People of Color and the acronym BIPOC. We want to recognize that in using this term, we are combining a number of populations that are distinct, have rich cultures and unique histories and therefore cannot fully honor the vast complexities of the experience of racism for individual groups. When possible, it’s always best to be specific in our use of language that is informed by the person of groups we are referring to. This resource contributed to our understanding on this topic.