Rapid City’s HRC/MOA are nationally recognized and invited to a major conference in L.A. this week

RAPID CITY, S.D. – Rapid City’s Human Relations Commission/Mniluzahan Okolakiciyapi Ambassadors (HRC/MOA) have been invited to the National Humanities Alliance Conference in Los Angeles this week.

They are receiving national recognition for their work to improve race relations.

This conference gives communities a chance to learn how others address race relations and the Rapid City delegation will consist of five members.

“It was really an honor for us to be included in this conference and as part of a case study. We’re part of a case study with two other cities. And the other cities are Nogales, Arizona, and Charleston, South Carolina,” Karen Mortimer, HRC MOA member, said. “We’re going to be giving a presentation, and we’ll be able to go to each other’s presentations and learn from each other. We’ll probably have another time during the conference where we’ll collectively come together and trade stories and ideas and develop some relationships.”

Here’s some information they shared about the conference starting Tuesday.

Some things that the HRC/MOA will share with other communities

• Why they’re doing the work
• What are some problems they’re trying to address
• Methods
  • Things that they’ve done that have worked
  • Things that haven’t worked
• Difficulties and roadblocks they encountered
• What they’re looking at in the future

What have been things that worked

“I think we’ve done well. Take a look at LNI and the red carpet. One time we had some difficulties in Rapid City with first relations and business owners. And now they come here with a police escort. Red carpet celebration, that’s absolutely wonderful,” Lloyd LaCroix, Pennington County commissioner said. “Same thing with the powwow and the hand games, these are the more we know, the better we do. Bringing people together and in the same room makes your judgements go away. It’s easy to judge people from a distance, but once you talk to them, you get it. And that’s what we do.”

“Community members are appreciative of having these experiences that they probably wouldn’t have had living their day to day lives. And a lot of leadership in Rapid City is fully participatory and excited, so they want to have the conversations and they want to have the trickle down effect in their corporations as well. So I think that’s huge,” LaFawn Janis, City of Rapid City’s Human Relations Commission coordinator, said.

“Some of the difficulties are between the mergers of different groups. Human Relations was originally formed. It’s been around for years to take complaints and concerns of racial bias or discourse in the community and even on the city council. When they brought it back years ago, it was to deal with substandard housing complaints. Most companies have to pretty much set rules. So the HRC just kind of was there, and the joining of these groups and educating the community is the key piece to this, because that’s what you need to do, is to get out and bring people together and have those talks and discussions. That’s why it actually brought the HRC up to the 21st century. It brought it out just the single taken complaints and actually educating the community. That was the difficulty and it still is,” LaCroix said.“This stuff took a lot of years to create the problems that we have, took a lot of years to get there and so we said ‘change happens at the speed of trust.’ There’s a lot of distrust in our community among people who are different,” Mortimer said. “So when we can bridge that and take time to develop relationships, we found that developing relationships is really the key. But until we can get to that trust level, which takes a lot of time, we’re not going to see huge changes. Which brings us to another thing that we learned, which is you got to go slow to go fast.

”What is a tactic they’re trying now Currently the HRC/MOA are holding different learning forums for people to come in to talk about specific topics to help the group learn more about it. They’ve done a forum on racial prejudices and the economy which showed how those prejudices affect dollars and what happens in the community. They will also have another one, Monday, Nov. 14 at Western Dakota Tech. They invited the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office and the Rapid City Police Department to be in the room as well to be a part of a round table discussion about civil discourse.Main goals of HRC/MOATheir main goals are trying to reach into the community, let people know that they’re there, to listen to concerns and try to address them in a really positive way. Not just in terms of legal framework, but to listen to people’s voices.

 

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