The Rian Immigrant Center is dedicated to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment to all in our diverse community. We believe that through community building, we can achieve a more respectful and aware society.
Listening and learning from each other is essential to gaining an understanding and appreciation of our different cultures. Throughout our history we have partnered with community organizations to host storytelling and cultural events. In partnership with the Montserrat Aspirers, Rian’s annual Black and Green Celebration brought people together for an evening of intercultural dialogue and celebrated the many contributions of Boston’s diverse immigrant community for over twenty-five years. Today, we continue this work by hosting virtual events that explore how we can contribute to systemic change, including our Black Lives Matter Conversations in partnership with Boston Irish Network and Boston Irish and our Lunch and Learn series.
Rian continues its commitment to advancing racial equity and building an organizational culture in which all guests, employees and volunteers feel a sense of belonging, safety and value. We are deeply committed to racial equity. Our country has been an exclusive and inequitable environment for racialized communities based on ideas and policies that normalize and uphold racial inequities. At Rian, we strive to create spaces of belonging, and to work toward racial equity. We are committed to promoting anti-racist ideas and policies, and to learning, listening and amplifying voices traditionally oppressed, valueing the intersectionality within these voices.
We commit to ongoing self-reflection as employees and as an organization, assessing written and unwritten policies to ensure a safe workplace, diverse hiring practices, and creating a culture where all feel welcomed; especially racialized employees, leaders, and people we serve. We strive to be active in the fight against racism by not tolerating language, values, actions or policies that intentionally and unintentionally uphold the idea of inferiority of one group to another. We commit to equally valuing people for all their apparent differences.
“To be anti-racist is to admit when we are being racist. And then not only that admission, but then we challenge those racist ideas. We adopt antiracist ideas that say the problem is power and policy when there is inequity, not people” – (Kendi, 2020).
