DEI Success Story: LWV of Amarillo (TX)

The LWV of Amarillo (TX) has been working on a webinar to Leagues called The Welcoming League: Community Outreach That Advances Diversity and Inclusion. This interactive presentation focuses on both promoting education around diversity, equity, and inclusion within the community and advocating for community-driven events that promote conversations with diverse groups. 

ACTION: Create presentations that include an interactive component to help foster conversations within the local community about DEI. 

The LWV of Amarillo was asked to develop a summer presentation aimed at promoting community outreach alongside local Leagues in Texas. They were tasked with speaking about DEI and took it upon themselves to create an interactive and conversational presentation. 

The President of the LWV of Amarillo, Sonya Letson, along with the Director of Forums and LWV of Texas Board Member, Linda Vaughn held a zoom session speaking to each other in a question-and-answer format. They focused on asking some key questions about DEI and providing ideas to help encourage it in the community. Some programs they promoted were partnering with food box distributors to place stickers on food boxes that had early voting and VOTE411 information, holding voter registration in jails, and promoting voter registration at comic conventions.  

The Texas League then put audience members in breakout rooms and the LWV of Amarillo’s breakout room brainstormed their own solutions to the questions presented by Letson and Vaughn. Participants had open discussions about solutions that the League should implement, and they educated themselves on diversity within their own communities by speaking to participants across the state.  

RECOMMENDATION: Integrate an interactive and conversational approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion presentations into your League in order to come up with solution-driven conversations and educate the community on DEI. 

The interactive format had very positive results within League communities. People reported feeling extremely engaged and informed after the presentation and the ideas that were presented have been very helpful for the Amarillo League as well as Austin and Hill Country Leagues.  

The LWV of Amarillo focuses on using a DEI lens and emphasizes keeping in mind that “we are a welcoming League, and we want every member or supporter to share ideas with us about how to advance diversity in all that we do,” says Letson.  

By providing participants with an interactive format, the LWV of Amarillo ha inspired other Texas leagues to make presentations both understandable and enjoyable and use a more creative means to exercise imagery, text, and discussion.