Fellows' Pursuit of Diversity Enriches Communities
A couple weeks back I met some new neighbors. They were not new to the neighborhood—they moved in more than a year ago—but they were new to me. They are a young couple with two small children. The husband is a chemist and has been working for a company in town for five years. He moved to the states from Syria. His wife is second-generation Syrian, has a college degree in biology, and wears a head scarf.
I note that she wears a head scarf because that makes her the first woman I’ve ever seen in my small Greater Minnesota town to do so. It also makes her kind of conspicuous. I would’ve noticed her if I’d seen her. Yet they’ve been living a few doors down from me and I don’t recall seeing either of them in all that time. It made me wonder if, clearly aware of their uniqueness in this town, they have tried to keep a low profile for fear of how they might be received. I don’t know this to be true—I will ask them sometime—but it would certainly be a reasonable fear where I live. That makes me sad and reminds me that true leadership, as we see it in the Fellowship, mobilizes people and resources to help make our communities more fair, just and inclusive.
In various descriptions of the Initiators Fellowship we’ve described our Fellows as “keystone” leaders, borrowing a concept from the field of ecology. In natural systems, keystone species have a disproportionate effect on their communities.
Thinking of my neighbors, I am reminded of another ecological principle: that the most resilient communities are those with the greatest diversity. Monocultures often are much more vulnerable to decimation by virtue of their members all being so similar. Diverse communities are more resilient because their members add something different to the whole and because each member has unique weaknesses and vulnerabilities, not the same ones as every other member. In the human world, diversity also makes a community more interesting—though sometimes more complicated.
I tend to believe that what’s true for non-human communities is also true for human ones, and that diversity adds more than it complicates. And I am hopeful that our Initiator Fellows, alumni and future Fellows can be a force for helping Greater Minnesota become more fair, just and inclusive so people like my new neighbors don’t have to keep a low profile for fear of how they’ll be received.
Contact, Chris Fastner, Initiators Fellowship program manager, at cfastner@ifound.org or (320) 631-2019.