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Topics: Community

Reprinted with permission of The Dallas Morning News
In Civic Partners, Spring 1996.
Published by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change.

Fargo, North Dakota.

Third-grader Robinson Tanazy grabs the hand of his fifth-grade friend, Nazar Ahmed, and pulls him past half-full classrooms and down the hall of Jefferson Elementary School.

The excited nine-year-old stops just short of two dozen miniature flags that represent countries from Bosnia to Vietnam.

"There it is right there!" he shouts, pointing his 11-year-old Kurdish friend toward the blue and red Haitian flag."See! That's my flag!"

Leaning against her nearby office, principal Martha DiCicco has reason to smile. The flags went up last year as part of an effort to acknowledge Jefferson's transformation from a virtually all-white school to one with nearly a 25 percent minority student body.

Jefferson reflects the changing demographics of North Dakota, long an ethnically homogenous state. The shift is most apparent in Fargo and neighboring Moorhead, Minnesota. The area's minority population has more than doubled in the past decade. Today, just less than 10 percent of its 130,000 residents are minorities.

Local leaders are trying to copy some of Jefferson's successes in a new areawide project aimed at preventing the language and race problems that have torn apart cities around the country.

"We want to try and anticipate any type of problems that might come up and avoid them," Fargo Mayor Bruce Furness says.

Fargo is among a handful of cities that have started programs aimed at addressing racial issues before ethnic or political crises develop.

"America as a nation, is being pulled apart at the seams. We are the new seam stitchers," says Sharif Abdullah, site director for the Three Valleys Project, which is working to reduce racial conflicts in the Portland, Oregon, area. "If we can pull together a new tapestry, there is hope for us as a nation. If we can't there simply isn't."

Historically, Fargo has been overwhelmingly populated by people of Scandinavian and German descent.

John Zaharia, 22, grew up in Fargo; he didn't talk to someone of African descent until he went to college. That would not be the case today, he notes.

"Once in a while I saw a black person go through town," says Mr. Zaharia, a local funeral director. "Except for one Oriental family, the entire [high] school was all white people."

Last year Fargo, West Fargo, Moorhead and Dilworth, another Minnesota town, won a $400,000 grant from the Pew Partnership for Civic Change to launch the Cultural Diversity Project. Fargo officials have spearheaded the project-- which benefits all four cities.

In a little more than a year, the project's innovative efforts have received national attention. Project organizers have been asked to make presentations to the nation's mayors and nonprofit organizations' leaders.

"I think we have made some inroads in educating the community and increasing the community's sensitivity toward minorities." says project coordinator Yoke-Sim Gunaratne."That's a good first step."

Mrs. Gunaratne, who was born in Malaysia and moved to Fargo a decade ago, says the project succeeds because many residents are willing to accept change.

For decades, residents' interaction with minorities was mostly limited to migrant workers from Texas who work on sugar beet farms in the summer. At the season's end, workers gathered their belongings, pulled their children from area public schools and moved back to Texas.

Minority Influx

Some whites have grumbled that Hispanics burden the welfare system and commit crimes. Some residents complained in July when migrant workers sought federal disaster relief because two months of rains prevented them from working on the farms.

"If one person is a welfare recipient or has a criminal history, then some people say the entire community must be that way," says Mr. Martinez, a former migrant worker. "It certainly affects us."

But he says the center, formed with financial help from the Cultural Diversity Project, has begun to educate the community about Hispanics.

"With the project's help, we've been able to bring community leaders together and say, 'Hey, we're in the same boat,'" he says."It's given us an opportunity to create a sense of community."

Not far from Mr. Martinez's office, down Main Street and across the Red River, the project also helps Fargo's 77,000 residents cope with the dramatic increase in refugee and American Indian populations, community leaders say.

The number of refugees arriving in Fargo has grown by more than 700 percent since 1989, according to the Refugee Program of the Episcopal Diocese of North Dakota and Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota, a joint ministry that sponsors refugee resettlements. Those who work with the refugees say Fargo is a logical new home because the city's unemployment rate is low and systems are in place to deal with refugee populations.

They come from several international hot spots: Kurdistan, Haiti, Russia, Bosnia, Zaire, Vietnam, Somalia, Sudan, Cuba, Armenia, Iraq. The refugees, and increasing numbers of American Indians moving to town from nearby reservations, had an immediate impact on the city's schools.

School Impact

The school brought in local residents from different countries to speak to students, hosted potluck dinners and picnics for parents to get to know one another, flew the flags of 18 countries in the hall, and translated classroom names into four languages.

"We wanted to do things that would make life better for residents here and to help new people feel at home," Ms. DiCicco says. "We are convinced that they [students] learned not just to see refugees as new students but they learned some of the differences."

Ms. DiCicco is working with community leaders to incorporate some of the successes at Jefferson Elementary into the areawide Cultural Diversity Project.

The need for education about cultural diversity emerged when community leaders gathered two years ago to brainstorm about proposals to win the Pew grant, says Kathy Hogan, director of social services for Cass County and a project founder.

The cultural diversity proposal won by one vote over others to seek a grant to address underemployment and children's issues, she says.

"Some people felt that there was really a change in our community and if we applied for the grant and got it, we'll be admitting that there's a problem and saying that we were going to do something about it," she says. "That was a big step."

Local corporations chipped in $150,000 in matching funds to fulfill a Pew Foundation requirement.

Project volunteers have helped train minority residents to serve on local boards and commissions, and funded the formation of cultural centers and cultural awareness programs at schools.

Organizers say that long-range plans include establishing a language center to help residents--more than a dozen languages are spoken in the area. They also plan to lobby local school boards to implement a multicultural curriculum.

"The feedback has been very good," says Mr. Furness, the mayor. "People are making an earnest effort to work together."

Some refugees agree. "People have been very friendly," says Valeria Foni, 27, who was resettled to Fargo from Sudan 17 months ago. She has joined a church and works as a secretary with the refugee program. "I talk with them about Fargo and my country."

Problems Remain But some refugees say the area has a way to go before they feel comfortable.

Martins Muoang says he fled the central African country of Zaire after his parents were killed in a car bomb. He arrived in Fargo two weeks ago with a friend, Gervais Langando, who had been jailed in the Central African Republic after he protested his government's decision to allow European nuclear waste into the country.

The men say recent incidents at a local park and on a city street have left them wondering whether they are really welcome. A man refused to let them borrow one of several balls he was not using to play soccer, and a carload of teenagers pointed and laughed at them as they walked home.

"Those kinds of things made us very sensitive," says Mr. Muoang, 30. "We are all human beings. I don't know why people would drive past in a car and insult another human being."

Despite the project's successes it would be virtually impossible to root out all the prejudice in the Fargo-Moorhead area, several residents say.

"A lot of people mourn the passing of that little white Anglo-Saxon state we used to be," says Joellen Smith, 45, a registered nurse. "For example, people are quick to blame the entire group of migrant workers for the actions of a few young men that sell drugs and things like that."

At Jefferson Elementary, students say embracing the community's diverse background has worked for them.

"When I came here I was scared and nervous. I didn't know any of the students in my class. I was scared about them and they were scared about me," says Nazar, who spent a year in a Turkish refugee camp before being resettled in Fargo about two years ago.

"Now, we know each other and we're not afraid anymore."

Resources on Diversity

Drawing Strength from Diversity. San Francisco: California Tomorrow,1994.

Julia Teresa Quiroz. Together in Our Differences: How Newcomers and Established Residents are Rebuilding American Communities. Washington, DC: The National Immigration Forum, 1995.

Scott Walker, Ed. Changing Community. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993.

More Information

Yoke-Sim Gunaratne, Project Coordinator
Cultural Diversity Project
810 4th Avenue South, Suite 147
Moorhead, MN 56560
Tel: 218-326-7277

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