3 Process Design
Plan, staff, create policies, and provide resources for a collaborative and/or decision-making process or use existing processes. To the extent feasible, engage stakeholders and other community members in constructive discussions, such that the symbols and interactions with them reflect the array of community members’ experience, and the process secures the support of those key to implementation and contributes to public understanding. Clarify where the decision-making power resides.
POSSIBLE STRATEGIES
Keeping in mind the assessment and planning goals:
- Determine who will design the consultative or collaborative process and make the decisions.
- Weigh the values of maximizing input, storytelling, and community-wide discussions against indications favoring a quick decision.
- When a quick decision seems warranted, consider engaging people after the decision in a process that builds relationships and understanding.
- Develop policies and processes for proactive symbols/public space planning over time.
- Consult with community members (for example, through focus groups) to identify different voices, secure new ideas, build relationships, and provide an opportunity to listen and be heard.
- Work deliberately to hear from those who would not usually become involved, such as persons who: feel targeted by aspects of the environment, might oppose the proposed changes, could help implement changes, and might develop relationships across typical fault lines within the community.
- Consider using facilitators/mediators, who: can involve those who would not typically attend a public meeting, are experienced in building relationships and understanding, might generate more trust among those who associate public officials with the status quo, and can create (working with the community) an appropriate collaborative process.
IN MORE DETAIL
Collaborative processes, if well-planned, may contribute even more than the changes themselves. People may not notice things that are objectionable to other people. This is a chance to educate them not only about the symbols but also to promote mutual understanding.
Engagement may also help people understand that there are competing points of view, not solely their own point of view, that will be weighed in decision-making. Those involved will be better prepared for change; some community members will predictably resist change otherwise. Co-design of space where everyone can lay claim to and have a role in creating the design may give broad ownership and therefore stronger support for the resources and efforts required to implement and sustain the plans. Early engagement of artists and other experts helps them understand community issues.
Bad process guarantees failure even though good process doesn’t guarantee success.
– E. Frank Dukes, University of Virginia Institute for Engagement and Negotiation
Carefully planned consultation and collaboration can help bring about an environment that more closely meets the community’s or campus’s goals. In addition, that process, especially if expertly facilitated, can promote trust in the outcome of the process. Social science research also suggests that the group working over a period of time with equal status, enjoyment, and common goals, can advance understanding across bitter divides within the community.[1] That promise is sometimes so powerful that it is achieved not only among members of the deliberative group but also positively influences those who know them.[2]
Bringing community members into the process may also make the decision’s reversal less likely – significant because backlash to these decisions occurs with some frequency.
In some situations, delays carry more significance. In the South Carolina illustration described below, the Confederate battle flag flying over the statehouse deeply offended many people. Another key circumstance was that the time was ripe for doing something to show the state’s support for its Black residents. That circumstance might not recur for a while. Further, suggesting that there was something to talk about before removing the flag might itself add insult. These factors weigh in favor of a quick decision.
Collaborative process often takes time and thus poses challenges in other settings. For example, in universities new students arrive each year with enthusiasm about being part of positive change, while those who have been working on the issues over time suffer from fatigue and impatience at bringing new students up to speed.
ILLUSTRATIONS
A collaborative process leading to broad support for change
The Process of a Community Engaging with each other and deciding what to do is the real transformation, the real reckoning with systemic injustice.
– Dominic Bryan, an anthropologist at Queens, University of Belfast, Northern Ireland
In 2020, the National Trust for Historic Preservation contracted with two mediators, Selena Cozart and Frank Dukes of the University of Virginia Institute for Engagement and Negotiation, to help with a 27-year-long controversy. The parties were the governing body (board of directors for the Montpelier Foundation) for the Virginia plantation home of James Madison, the fourth President and a drafter of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the descendants of the other 300 Montpelier’s enslaved residents, the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC).
In 2021, those involved in the mediation reached agreement, wherein half of the foundation’s board members will be members nominated by the MDC. The site will host a history of Montpelier that includes the stories of those who were enslaved there.[3]
Circumstances favoring a quick decision
For decades, people marched to the South Carolina Capitol to ask that the Confederate battle flag flying there be removed. They said that the flag conveyed that racism, hate, and white supremacy were alive and well in America. State officials retained the flag, nonetheless. Then in 2015 – three weeks after a white gunman who had posed with Confederate flags was charged with the murder of nine African Americans in a Bible Study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston– the South Carolina legislature approved, and the Governor signed, a bill removing the flag. Should there have been a collaborative process first? Rev. Nelson B. Rivers, III, Pastor, Charity Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, who had advocated that change for decades, said that an offer to talk before removing the flag would have been insulting. “There’s nothing to talk about. Every day it stays up, it says, ‘Your life does not matter as much as our debate.’”
Competing timing and process considerations
The statues in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection offer an illustration of weighing the advantages of using existing deliberative processes against the time that significant numbers of people would feel that they were enduring a toxic environment. State leaders decide what statue represents their state, under current Congressional rules. Using that process, Virginia recently removed the statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s military commander, and replaced it with the statue of civil rights advocate Mary McLeod Bethune – without national political controversy. In contrast, a great deal of controversy arose when the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to change the usual state-initiative process to a Congressional one and remove statues of the president and vice president of the Confederacy, among others, which the states submitting the statues had made no decision to withdraw.[4] A former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus explained that the Caucus was impatient with waiting for the states to remove the statues of persons who betrayed the nation to keep their ancestors enslaved. “Imagine how I feel and other African Americans and people of color feel walking through Statutory Hall…” she said, as quoted by The Hill.[5]
Deep Dive: Carthage College – Kenosha, Wisconsin
Designing a process that encourages broad participation and reflects community values can support more thoughtful and durable outcomes. Carthage College’s approach to reconsidering its team name and mascot offers a helpful example of how early planning, inclusive engagement, and clear structure can shape a constructive path forward, even when the subject matter is emotionally charged.
In 2020, concerns surfaced about the connotations for racial and gender equity in Carthage College’s use of “the Redmen” and “Lady Reds” as athletic team names and “Torchie” as the mascot. The concerns led the Carthage College Board of Trustees to convene the Task Force on Team Names and Mascots, which engaged about 3,000 stakeholders.[6] Most agreed that a change was warranted. The Board then decided to make the change. Following the change, the college’s office of equity and inclusion implemented long-term and short-term actions to strengthen the school’s unified community. These actions included refraining from referring to the school’s teams with the previous names and requiring each athletic team to attend a diversity, equity, and inclusion program during the academic year.
A process was next convened to choose new names. With broad participation by students, staff, and alumni, the three finalist names were “Lake Hawks”, “Fire” and “Firebirds”. Finally, the name “Firebirds” followed by the mascot “Ember” was chosen, and the Board of Trustees adopted them on February 19, 2021. The persuasive point was the story about the Firebird. This mythical creature is “made of living fire or light, the firebird appears in the folklore of several cultures.”[7] In surveys, Carthaginians endorsing the name described it as “bold,” “fierce,” “uncommon,” “majestic,” and “inspiring.” Many noted the firebird’s ties to the flames in the existing Carthage seal and logo — which represent the torch of knowledge — as well as the College’s primary color, red. Fans also drew a parallel between the radiant beauty of the legendary bird and the natural elegance of the campus, an 80-acre arboretum along Lake Michigan. The process and enthusiastic discussion of potential new names may have helped the community support the change.[8]
- Yehuda Amir, Contact Hypothesis in Ethnic Relations, in The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence 162 (Eugene Weiner, ed., 1998); Louis Kriesberg, Coexistence and the Reconciliation of Communal Conflicts, in The Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence 182 (Eugene Weiner, ed., 1998); Muzafer Sherif, Group Conflict and Cooperation (1966); Keith G. Allred, Relationship Dynamics in Disputes: Replacing Contention with Cooperation, in The Handbook of Dispute Resolution 83 (Michael L. Moffitt & Robert C. Bordone, eds., 2005). ↵
- Stefania Paolini et al., Effects of Direct and Indirect Cross-Group Friendships on Judgments of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland: The Mediating Role of an Anxiety-Reduction Mechanism, 30 Personality & Soc. Psych. Bull. 770 (2004). ↵
- Brenda Jones, James Madison’s Montpelier Votes to Share Power with Descendants of Plantations Enslaved People, Nat’l Tr. for Historic Pres. (June 18, 2021), https://savingplaces.org/press-center/media-resources/montpelier-votes-to-share-power-with-descendants-of-plantations-enslaved-people#.YYcrMRDMJAd. ↵
- Savannah Behrmann & Ledyard King, House Passes Bill to Remove Confederate Statues from the Capitol, USA Today (June 29, 2021), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/29/confederate-statues-would-removed-under-house-bill-going-vote/5371156001/. ↵
- Cristina Marcos, House Passes Bill to Remove Confederate Statues from Capitol, The Hill, June 29, 2021, https://thehill.com/homenews/house/560804-house-passes-bill-to-remove-confederate-statues-from-capitol/. ↵
- “Carthage Retires Red Men, Lady Reds As Its Athletic Team Names,” Carthage Athletics, https://athletics.carthage.edu/news/2020/9/9/general-carthage-retires-red-men-lady-reds-as-its-athletic-team-names.aspx. ↵
- “Carthage College Announces New Nickname: Firebirds,” Collegiate Water Polo Association, https://collegiatewaterpolo.org/carthage-college-announces-new-nickname-firebirds/. ↵
- “Carthage College Picks Firebirds as New Athletics Name,” FOX6 News Digital Team, February 19, 2021, https://www.fox6now.com/news/carthage-college-firebirds-athletics-name-change. ↵
