The report, recommended by the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns calls for the church’s major agencies to:
• implement a new program of “cultural proficiency” and urge vendors to use the same program,
• take several specific steps to work toward increasing the number of people of color in high-level jobs, and
• track diversity in employment, compensation levels and purchasing. It also directed the General Assembly Council fund and staff the GAC Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action.
The committee rejected a proposal that the church stop using the term “racial ethnic” and replace it with the phrase “emerging majorities,” instead asking the committee to suggest a new term at the 217th General Assembly in 2008. And it backed away from a proposal to increase funding in the Presbyterian Foundation’s Creative Investment Fund from $8 million to $20 million over five years – instead encouraging an unspecified increase – to foster investment in ethnic communities.
“The most important thing we did today was the cultural proficiency,” said Curtis Jones, who chaired the task force that wrote the report. “We won that battle before we got here,” Jones said. The GAC, along with other agencies, already use the program, which helps groups discuss, respond to and plan for issues that arise in diverse environments.
“All of us in the leadership positions have endorsed this process and worked hard to implement it and worked hard to be supportive of it,” said GAC executive director John Detterick. “It really is a process that helps us think differently about who we are as an organization, and helps understand the differences between the culture we’ve got, the culture we want to have, and cultures we don’t want to have.”
