Members of the Northwest Arkansas Council and Northwest Arkansas Community College said they are hoping to improve the recruiting potential for businesses by attracting racially diverse applicants to the region.
The Northwest Arkansas Diversity Guide, a website launched last week, is a tool intended to help people research the area’s communities to help them decide whether the area is a good fit for them and their families. The website can be found at www.diversitynwa.org.
Kim Davis, director of education and workforce development for the council, said the website is designed to help businesses in Northwest Arkansas reach out to a racially diverse pool of job candidates by demonstrating that the area is a place where they can feel comfortable.
“We want to highlight those businesses before they even set their foot down in Bentonville,” Davis said.
“What we’ve heard from large employers who are recruiting folks from afar is that even before [the candidates] come here, they’ve researched the area,” Davis said. “There wasn’t a lot of information available, and the census demographics don’t tell the whole story.”
According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the white populations of Benton, Carroll, Madison and Washington counties range from about 73 percent in Washington County to more than 91 percent in Madison County. And though black populations, for example, have increased in those four counties since the 2000 Census, they still make up a statistically small percentage of the overall population, ranging from 0.4 percent in Madison County to 3.2 percent in Washington County.
Kathryn Birkhead, director of diversity and inclusion at Northwest Arkansas Community College, said the website developed from goals discussed in the Northwest Council Strategic Plan, published in 2011.
“This [website] was an idea that surfaced. We wanted a guide of some sort, although we weren’t sure what it would look like,” Birkhead said.
A banner across the top of the site’s homepage invites viewers to explore eight aspects of life in the area, including religious worship, restaurants and nightlife.
“Those were the things we heard the greatest need for, from people who had moved into the area,” Birkhead said.
The banner also features a section dedicated solely to haircare, the importance of which should not be underestimated, Birkhead and others said.
Pearl Ford Dow, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas whose research and teaching focus on presidential politics and black political behavior, said an appreciation of haircare in the black community is important when trying to makean area appealing to racially diverse candidates.
“People did mention to me that there was about only one person who cut hair here,” Dow said, recalling conversations she had with associates who were familiar with Northwest Arkansas.
Dow, who began teaching at the university in 2008 after teaching at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., said she wasn’t very familiar with Northwest Arkansas when she applied for the position, and she had never visited the area. Although Dow visited Fayetteville before accepting her current position with the university, she said she primarily relied on the experiences of others to establish a sense of whether she and her then-fiance, who are both black, would feel comfortable in Fayetteville.
“Before I interviewed, I contacted several people and talked with them about their experiences here,” Dow said. “That made me more comfortable with the position. They said it was an adjustment - that there wasn’t a lot of racial diversity here, but that it was getting there. They mentioned that African Americans didn’t go into Bentonville in the 1980s, but they also expressed a sense of progress. That people here were very nice, open, and that there were increasing opportunities here.”
Davis said the advantage of using a website instead of distributing a print publication is that it can be adapted over time.
“This is a living, growing document,” Davis said. “It’s not the beginning or the end of everything Northwest Arkansas has to offer.”
The website features a “submit info” button, which Birkhead said site administrators will use to continually add to or correct information on the site.
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 09/24/2013