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CommUNITY 2000: Strategies for Preventing and Responding to Community Tensions

Every sector of society - including teachers, parents and families, law enforcement, young people, business leaders, and the community-at-large - has a role to play in preventing and reconciling incidents of hate in a community.

The following tools, strategies, and resources provide critical information that will help enhance your efforts to create communities free of bias and hate.

Fight Hate: A Prevention and Response Guide for America's Neighborhoods

CommUNITY 2000 has prepared this manual to help community leaders, fair housing advocates, and others prevent and respond effectively to housing-related hate crimes and tensions. This manual provides:

  • Legal information needed to uphold justice in your community in the wake of housing-related hate activity
  • A "who's who" guide to law enforcement and the justice system
  • Steps in building a rapid response network and protocol for preventing and responding to housing-related hate activity
  • Contacts and resources to help ensure and immediate response to hate activity in your community

Fight Hate: A Prevention and Response Guide for America's Neighborhoods

Preventing Hate, Promoting Respect

Preventing Hate, Promoting Respect is a tool to engage students in thinking about their own biases, their experiences with diversity and discrimination, and the essential social skill for living in a diverse society. More importantly, this tool provides concrete strategies for moving students beyond just thinking, to actually changing their own social behavior and positively influencing that of their peers.

The software program allows for flexible scope and sequence, so that you can take advantage of "teachable" moments. Topics covered by the Preventing Hate, Promoting Respect program have been organized into two sequenced categories: "Building Skills" and "Exploring Diversity," making it easy for you to just "click and go." The first set of topics is designed to help students explore thoughts and feelings about diversity, and help them to reflect on personal experience and think about themselves in relation to people whose race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or abilities may be different from their own. The second category of topics promotes life skills essential not just for positive intergroup relations, but for positive interpersonal and intragroup relations as well. Discussion questions are built into each lesson.

The Manual that accompanies the CD includes a background section on the nature of hate crimes; offers suggestions for adults to explore their own experiences with diversity and bias; and provides a handout to introduce students to the program.

To receive a copy of the Preventing Hate, Promoting Respect CD-Rom tool, contact:
Leadership Conference Education Fund
Department of Education
1629 K Street, NW, 10th floor
Washington, DC 20006
info@civilrights.org

Teaching Fair Housing Lesson Plan

These teaching materials on Fair Housing and Diversity are designed to:

  • Help students understand and explore Fair Housing from a moral, ethical, and historical perspective.
  • Give students an opportunity to work cooperatively toward a common goal and in the process learn to understand their similarities and celebrate their differences across racial, ethnic, religious and ability/disability lines.
  • Explore the meaning of diversity, prejudice and civil rights (historical and contemporary) and the relevance of these terms to their lives.
  • Examine the negative consequences of segregated communities.
  • Experience the value, for the individual and for the country, of inter-group understanding and interaction -- embracing diversity.

The materials can be used on their own, but are particularly effective when used as a means to help students create posters, skits, or stories or essays designed to educate other people about fair housing.

Download the Teaching Fair Housing Lesson Plan (pdf).