Greetings from the SFCP Interim Equity & Inclusion (E&I) Steering Committee!
This is the first of what will be regular communications meant to keep the entire SFCP community informed of our committee’s work and the progress of SFCP’s Equity & Inclusion initiative in general.
Our committee exists because SFCP needs to do further work to process and integrate the changes in our Center following the work of the Anti-Racism Task Force, the Strategic Planning process, a series of community meetings, the acceptance of new training standards at SFCP to increase the accessibility of psychoanalytic training, and the reality that the work of dealing with issues of equity and inclusion on personal and group levels is very much an ongoing process, at times a contentious and painful process.
The members of our interim committee are Chuck Fisher, Debora Fletcher, Marcia Hodges, Clara Kwun, and Beth Steinberg. We are working with David Luna, the E&I consultant hired by SFCP after a lengthy and thorough search and selection process. David has decades of experience in E&I consulting, and he has served organizations of all sorts throughout the country. Our committee exists to provide initial guidance and oversight to the further work needing to be done.
In our first two meetings, we have laid groundwork for how we will work as a group, drafted a very preliminary E&I Vision Statement for SFCP (just enough to guide our work for the time being), and clarified the specific mission of our committee. In our next few meetings, we will be brainstorming how we might expand the committee to include more perspectives and voices so as to engage the broader organization. We also will begin to brainstorm the major pieces of E&I work that SFCP needs to do and a preliminary priority order for those pieces.
One of our committee’s key values and commitments is to be as transparent as possible as often as possible to the whole SFCP community. With this in mind, please expect to hear from us often.
Warm regards
Chuck Fisher, Debora Fletcher, Marcia Hodges, Clara Kwun, and Beth Steinberg
Stay tuned for the E&I Resources Webpage with resources and information about the history of E&I at SFCP and nationally! In the meantime, for more background on this initiative, please see Excerpts from the Proposal to the SFCP Board for Equity and Inclusion Consultant.