by Casey Wong, Assoc. AIA
EDI Committee Member
With the goal of creating a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive Chapter, I am happy to present the final AIACV EDI Community Guidelines that were approved by the AIACV Board and adopted across our entire chapter on June 11th. The purpose of the community guidelines is to help establish new approaches to allow forconscious questioning and active listening. In the guidelines, we introduce the concept of brave space into our committee meetings. A brave space is one that encourages dialogue. In a brave space, we recognize the differences among people and hold each person accountable to do the work of sharing experiences and coming to new understandings. This is often a hard and typically uncomfortable process. The community guidelines were also created to help equalize the space to allow everyone to share their thoughts and opinions. This also means uplifting the voices of those who are usually not included or heard – “giving a voice to the voiceless.”
I, along with the entire EDI Committee,hope that our membership takes ownership of the community guidelines and encourage each other to continue growing, sharing, learning, and challenging ourselves. I am thankful for my experiences to be able to interact in brave spaces with community guidelines and I am glad to be able to share our community guidelines within our circles to continue pushing for equity, diversity, and inclusion.
A special thank you to our EDI Chairs, Gennifer Munoz, AIA and Genevieve Vargas, as well as fellow committee member Mike Parrott, AIA for their efforts and support in the creation and development of this document and to the AIACV EDI Committee for testing the community guidelines.
If you have any questions about the guidelines, or would like to become involved with the EDI Committee, please reach out to the Chapter office: [email protected].