We believe that everyone should be welcomed, heard, respected and involved.
Our focus on “All Voices Do Matter” is closely connected to our primary purpose of striving for excellence in community engagement.
We aim to uphold the fundamental principle that in all cultural community engagements everyone should be heard, respected and involved. In striving for this, the CMCCF makes every effort to ensure that our community engagements provide opportunities for diverse participation, a welcoming of differing views, and an affirmation that all voices are important.
We continue to hear that many people coming from cultural communities feel their voices do not matter, are not heard, and they are not in a position to speak and express what they’re feeling and thinking, especially the numerous hurdles that they face.
Our experience in cultural community engagement has confirmed several important hurdles by which various cultural communities have felt excluded, psychologically unsafe, not paid attention to, biased against, and minimized regarding their points of view and their lived experiences.
In this regard, many who wish to bring forward their voices in a few important areas of their lives have faced personal risk, fear of loss of self-esteem and value, triggering their self-censoring instinct and experience for self-preservation.
We know that there are several psychological safety breaches that routinely occur between cultural communities, the host community, service providers and policy makers. They include the following:
- Felt excluded in many settings where people from cultural communities are placed as recipients of services and public policies;
- Were fearful of asking questions of importance and being heard and validated;
- Were forced to remain silent in situations where their voices do matter;
- Were targeted with negative stereotyping;
- Were faced with retaliation for challenging the status quo;
- Felt inferior, shamed, threatened, made fun of because of difference; and
- Felt betrayed where their voices were asked for and their input was ignored or minimized.
CMCCF’s main objective is to create safe spaces to be reflective together so we may speak our mind, voice our fears and hopes, and find the strength to be more resilient, as well as agency and capacity to support each other and our network of cultural communities.
We support, empower, and amplify cultural community voices through “excellence in engagement.”
We do this by:
- Providing opportunities for community members to be directly involved in all stages of engagements, from planning and organizing to collecting and analyzing what we learn;
- Training community members to serve as both virtual and in-person facilitators/conveners;
- Using a range of tools and technologies in carrying out engagements to enable wide participation.
See our projects that connect to and address this Community Needs’ theme of “All Voices Do Matter”:
