Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities

The Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities (VCIC) mission is to work with schools, businesses, and communities to achieve success by addressing prejudices, in all forms, to improve academic achievement, increase workplace productivity, and enhance local trust. Through workshops, retreats, and customized programs that raise knowledge, motivation, and skills, VCIC develops leaders who work together to achieve success throughout the Commonwealth. VCIC’s work increases individual knowledge, skill, and willingness to stand up against bias and discrimination, while giving teams and individual leaders the tools to drive inclusive shifts in culture, policy and practice across their institutions and communities.

VCIC’s vision is to create a Virginia where every person is included and where prejudice, intolerance, and fear of facing those issues don’t stand in the way of success for our schools, businesses, and communities. In order to achieve this vision, our overarching organizational goal is to transform thousands of individual Virginians and hundreds of organizations each year into knowledgeable, committed, and skilled advocates for inclusion who can make meaningful, lasting changes in their local environments for years to come.

VCIC services and programs bridge the gap between immediate responses to incidents of bias, discrimination, or hate, and long-term, proactive efforts to lead organizations and communities toward active inclusion and equity. VCIC’s “Awareness to Action” program methodology has been shown to dramatically increase individual knowledge, skill, and willingness to stand up against bias and discrimination, and VCIC’s Success through Inclusion framework gives teams and individual leaders the tools to drive inclusive shifts in culture, policy and practice across their institutions and communities. VCIC’s program strategy focuses on three main areas of change:

Schools: VCIC educator professional development and student leadership programs engage over 11,000 participants each year, reducing bullying, stereotypes, and prejudice in schools and youth-serving organizations.

Businesses: VCIC staff provide professional development for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations, fostering workplace inclusion for over 4,000 participants annually.

Communities: VCIC provides locally-focused programs for over 5,000 individuals annually that address critical community issues such as race relations, interfaith understanding, immigration and xenophobia, and poverty.

The services that VCIC provides (both in-person and virtual) have a significant impact on individuals, organizations, and communities across Virginia. VCIC’s robust program evaluations regularly demonstrate statistically significant changes in individual knowledge, skill, and motivation to create change around issues of bias, discrimination, and inclusion within their schools, businesses, and communities. Additionally, through the development and supported implementation of inclusion action plans, many VCIC programs also have a direct impact on organizations themselves, catalyzing shifts in both policy and culture that make them measurably more inclusive.

The Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities is the only non-profit organization serving the entire Commonwealth of Virginia with a demonstrated track-record of helping schools, businesses, and communities advance inclusion through learning, engagement, and skill-building. As an organization, VCIC has over 85 years of experience in promoting inclusion across multiple lines of difference in Virginia. In addition to this deep experience, our team also brings cutting-edge knowledge of best practices in diversity, equity, and inclusion education, identity development research, and bias-reduction strategies.

VCIC also brings to our work a high level of on-the-ground applied experience and deep connections to key stakeholders and affected communities across Virginia. VCIC’s professional staff of a dozen facilitators conduct hundreds of programs, training over 20,000 Virginians annually. Staff member engage in rigorous ongoing professional development and peer-to-peer observation and skill-building. With a State Board comprised of educational, business, and civic leaders from across the Commonwealth, and volunteer chapters in Lynchburg, Peninsula, Richmond, and Tidewater along with a state-wide reach, VCIC also benefits from engaging a highly skilled and diverse mix of Virginians in guiding and supporting our local work. Finally, thanks to many years of prudent fiscal management, strategic capacity growth, and strong community support, VCIC has the internal organizational systems, checks and balances, and prudent reserve fund resources necessary to ensure that we can continue meeting our goals even in uncertain and challenging times.

Founded in 1935 as the Virginia Region of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), VCIC’s early work focused on helping communities address religious and ethnic intolerance in Virginia. Increasing work on racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s, and on an expanding set of diversity issues throughout the 1970s through 1990s cemented NCCJ’s (and now VCIC’s) reputation as a trusted and valued resource for advancing inclusion across the state.

Incorporating into an independent nonprofit in the 2000s, VCIC is now a statewide leader in supporting Virginia schools, businesses, and communities to navigate issues related to diversity and inclusion, providing over 500 workshops, retreats, summits and community forums for schools, businesses, and communities across the Commonwealth each year. Evaluations consistently demonstrate that VCIC activities produce measurable results in reducing bias and increasing inclusion for tens of thousands of participants each year. Furthermore, VCIC programs consistently result in significant and concrete long-term changes in individual behaviors, organizational cultures, and DEI-related organizational and educational policies.

By providing rigorous, evidence-based programs that measurably increase thousands of Virginians’ knowledge, skills, and capacity to advance equity in schools, businesses, and communities across the Commonwealth, VCIC is making significant progress toward our vision of a Virginia where every person is included, and where prejudice, intolerance, and fear of facing those issues don’t stand in the way of success.