Exploring Systemic Racism and Its Implications for Our Libraries - Gainesville (05/12/16) 

"If I Hadn't Believed It, I Wouldn't Have Seen It"

This interactive workshop will engage attendees in an exploration of how race, systemic racism, and racial privilege have implications for our personal and professional lives.  Tools to help us better recognize and address racism and other forms of oppression in our relationships, organizations, and institutions will be provided.

Learning Objectives:

• Reflect on your experience of systemic racism and its implications for your work and for the library field
• Learn and apply a framework for seeing, naming, and understanding systemic racism and white privilege
• Use this framework to analyze how race, racism, and white privilege operate

Trainers: Donna Bivens and Paul Marcus

Donna Bivens has done racial equity consulting and training with Community Change, Inc. for over 10 years.

Donna is currently Project Director of the Boston Busing/Desegregation Project at the Union of Minority Neighborhoods (UMN). Before working at UMN, she served many years as co-director of the Women’s Theological Center in Boston, a center of women’s theological and popular education grounded in social action. 

Donna has worked with scores of organizations around the country on race and racism and working across difference. Her racial equity work focuses on systemic racism, class and internalized racism.  She also works as a facilitator for The Center for Courage and Renewal an organization founded by Parker Palmer whose mission is to is to create a more just, compassionate and healthy world by nurturing personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it.

Donna's publications include “Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building” (co-author), “The Possibility of Transformation: 25 Years Later,” in the book Education as Liberation “Internalized Racism: A Definition” and “Struggling through Injury in the Work of Love” (co-author).

Paul Marcus is a white anti-racist activist, educator and consultant.  He is the lead trainer at Community Change, Inc. in Boston, MA, an organization where served as Executive Director for 16 years.  Founded in 1968, Community Change’s mission is to promote racial justice and equity by challenging systemic racism and acting as a catalyst for anti-racist action and learning.

Paul co-taught and taught the “History and Development of Racism in the United States of America” at Boston College for over 30 semesters and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Simmons College Graduate School of Social Work where he teaches “Dynamics of Racism and Oppression.” He served as a Master Teacher for the Critical Skills program at Antioch New England Graduate School where he trained teachers in an experiential, problem based, collaborative and outcome driven classroom model.

Paul has had extensive experience planning and conducting workshops and trainings for wide variety organizations and communities. He has worked with organizers and educators from all across the country exploring and challenging the role of white people in perpetuating and maintaining white supremacy, racism and white privilege. 

His own journey has led him to continually examine the limitations the ideological lenses he caries with him as a straight, white, male in a society that structurally privileges people with those identities. Foundational to all of his work is making visible the systemic reality of racism and other forms of oppression – you can’t challenge something if you don’t know it exists. 

Cost: NEFLIN classes are free of charge for Florida library staff.  Registration is required for all classes and NEFLIN members get priority.

Cancellation Deadline is 9:00 am on Tuesday, May 10, 2016.
See all NEFLIN CE policies at http://www.neflin.org/training.