Best 115 quotes in «inclusion quotes» category

Generally there are always a few things that get left off for some reason or other, although the criteria for inclusion vary from project to project.

I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.

Inclusion and fairness in the workplace . . . is not simply the right thing to do; it's the smart thing to do.

Marriage is a language of love, equality, and inclusion.

Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.

War and it's tragic repercussions are inclusive of all; surely a model for peace should strive for such inclusiveness.

Tech is not looking for inclusion per se, but they're looking for assimilation. They're looking for Blacks and Latinos and women, but they are looking for these groups as versions of themselves.

We have the Internet of Everything but not the inclusion of everyone.

Accessibility means more than adding a ramp between the sidewalk and the front door of a building. It includes the ease in which a product, service, or environment can be utilized across "diverse human populations, their abilities and their needs".

A church's efforts to start one aspect of the special needs ministry should be applauded.

Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

As a result, the success of the ministry volunteers is often every bit as important as the success of the participating kids. And the skills of the ministry leaders do impact the accommodation plans that are developed for participants with special needs.

As church leaders, part of our job is to create ministry where serving is a pleasure. And one way we can do that is by tempering the expectations placed on volunteers and simplifying their responsibilities. Eliminating any secondary agenda is always a good thing.

A Jesus-focused ministry gives greater weight to connection over correction, recognizing that change and spiritual growth occur in the context of meaningful relationships. The student with special needs is more like to develop a personal relationship with Jesus if no one is hung up on the deficit in interpersonal skills and instead everyone cares more about providing a positive, anxiety-free church experience.

Anyone can be made to feel like an outsider. It’s up to the people who have the power to exclude. Often it’s on the basis of race. Depending on a culture’s fears and biases, Jews can be treated as outsiders. Muslims can be treated as outsiders. Christians can be treated as outsiders. The poor are always outsiders. The sick are often outsiders. People with disabilities can be treated as outsiders. Members of the LGBTQ community can be treated as outsiders. Immigrants are almost always outsiders. And in most every society, women can be made to feel like outsiders—even in their own homes. Overcoming the need to create outsiders is our greatest challenge as human beings. It is the key to ending deep inequality. We stigmatize and send to the margins people who trigger in us the feelings we want to avoid. This is why there are so many old and weak and sick and poor people on the margins of society. We tend to push out the people who have qualities we’re most afraid we will find in ourselves—and sometimes we falsely ascribe qualities we disown to certain groups, then push those groups out as a way of denying those traits in ourselves. This is what drives dominant groups to push different racial and religious groups to the margins. And we’re often not honest about what’s happening. If we’re on the inside and see someone on the outside, we often say to ourselves, “I’m not in that situation because I’m different. But that’s just pride talking. We could easily be that person. We have all things inside us. We just don’t like to confess what we have in common with outsiders because it’s too humbling. It suggests that maybe success and failure aren’t entirely fair. And if you know you got the better deal, then you have to be humble, and it hurts to give up your sense of superiority and say, “I’m no better than others.” So instead we invent excuses for our need to exclude. We say it’s about merit or tradition when it’s really just protecting our privilege and our pride.

As a church, we need to be very careful about developing and expressing opinions on these topics.

As church leaders, our opinions on these topics aren't necessary to effectively love and support families who have children with disabilities. Encourage ministry team members and volunteers to remember the calling of the church: to enable families to develop a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

As ministry leaders and volunteers, it's our job to care mostly about a family's connection inside our church, and ultimately with Jesus Christ.

As with everything else, the more we separate ourselves from each other, the weaker we become.

... collectively they all taught us generosity, kindness, and inclusion, and that you always share what you have, even when it's not much. My parents managed to construct a little safe haven for my sisters and me to build ourselves within, which seems almost impossible to me when I think about how quickly childhood seems to disappear these days. They have taught me about the truest kind of love: the kind that is steadfast and strong, even when it changes shape.

By and large, the special needs ministry leader is a translator of sorts, responsible for understanding and bridging the gap between two very unique cultures: the church and the special needs community.

By its very nature, special needs accommodation is more individualized than the typical children's ministry.

Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude. In Scripture, Jesus is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down through it, so Jesus can heal him. The focus of the story is, understandably, the healing of the paralytic. But there is something more significant than that happening here. They're ripping the roof off the place, and those outside are being let in.

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.

By simplifying the goals for the child's church experience, the child is more likely to thrive in church,

Don't let anyone tell you, ever, that this is a zero-sum game. Your genius does not threaten me. It delights and inspires me.

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it.

Create inclusion - with simple mindfulness that others might have a different reality from your own.

Different people do different things. And no one-way of plugging in or serving in the church is more beneficial or valuable than the other. The same thing is true for our students with special needs. And it's our church's responsibility, in partnership with parents, to clear the path so that God can pursue our teens through the abilities and passions He's already given them. - Katie Garvert

Everyone wins when the "burden" mind-set is abandoned and where the special needs ministry sees itself as a blessing to those who choose to be part of their community.

Good people disagree on how a church should run virtually every ministry inside a church, and this is especially true for special needs ministry.

Few things feel as threatening to a mother as does something that jeopardizes others' love for and acceptance of her child.

Even if the family is wrestling through theological issues related to their child's diagnosis, it is less important that the church leader be prepared to provide answers right now, than it is they enter into the pain with the family. Instead of searching for the right theological solutions in the moment, ask for God's guidance on what to say and what not to say. The single greatest desire from families was for their church friends to join them in their grief. Receiving validation for their feelings of loss was more important to parents than receiving an explanation of that loss.

Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.

I am no thinker - what I really am is, a brother to every girl and boy, a son to every woman and man, a grandson to every elderly person - I belong to every single person on earth, for you all are my own family - your tradition is my tradition, your culture is my culture, your religion is my religion, your language is my language - science means nothing to me, scriptures mean nothing to me, God means nothing to me, for I see my God in you - you are my home, you are my temple, you are my God, you are my gospel - and nothing gives me greater bliss than being annihilated in your service.

If a church doesn't have the volunteers, the space, and the resources to launch a ministry with every base covered, let's not chide them for getting it wrong. Let's cheer them on for taking a step in the right direction, for meeting the immediate needs in their midst, and for expanding their accommodation to any degree, and striving to do it well.

If a circle shuts you out, draw a circle around it.

If a minority culture doesn't accept you as much as majority culture, think about following a path of non-conformity

I'd shut myself out for so long that I had forgotten how wonderful it felt to be included, to be seen, to be heard.

I believe women’s groups are essential for each of us individually but also for society generally—because progress depends on inclusion, and inclusion begins with women. I’m not saying we should include women and girls as opposed to men and boys, but along with them and on behalf of them. This is not about bringing women in and leaving others out. It’s about bringing women in as a way to bring everyone in.

If we can't start by seeing an autistic child as inherently capable, interesting, and valuable, no amount of education or therapy we layer on top is going to matter.

If you build a wall to separate people, there will be those who find a way around the wall, or over it, or under it, or through it. We humans are not meant to be contained, and neither are our thoughts.

If you don’t understand, please keep your mouth shut and just live with all sentient beings in peace and harmony beyond your intellectual speculation. It’s not necessary to think how much that helps people or how many people it helps. All you have to do is be peaceful with people right now, right here, day by day.

I hope the exposure to other people and places shapes what the kids do, but even more I want it to shape who they are. I want them to see that in the universal human desire to be happy, to develop our gifts, to contribute to others, to love and be loved—we’re all the same. Nobody is any better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s.

If the parents felt they had a healthy line of communication with the children's ministry team and the church was following up in a timely manner, they tended to reflect on the setbacks less negatively. Parents were more likely to continue their involvement with the church if they perceived the children's ministry leadership was working proactively to appropriately accommodate their child.

I know hiding your prejudice behind your ignorance isn’t enough. Because I have been the mom scrambling to provide my four-year-old with a somewhat intelligent, unproblematic answer when he went through a phase of questioning bindis (and fashioning his own replicas out of modeling clay). Ignoring things I don’t understand can’t be an option given that I am guiding the next generation.

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

In churches that care about special needs inclusion I have found that the single biggest determinant for a child's success is the strength of the relationship between the church and the child's parents. When church leaders and parents are in general agreement regarding a child's abilities and needs, problems tend to get solved with greater speed and ingenuity. But when parents view their child's special needs as nonexistent or insignificant, it creates extra work (and stress!) for everyone serving that child. This is the reason that it is sometimes easier for churches to successfully include children with complex needs that are obvious than it is for churches to successfully include high-functioning children whose disabilities are less obvious. When parents dismiss a child's legitimate need for even occasional assistance it makes it really hard for the child and the volunteers serving them to experience success.

[I]nclusion, not assimilation, should be the key concept in seeking, ever seeking, a more perfect national union. Our own history has shown that we are stronger as a mosaic than a melting pot. Our nation is bound together more by ideals than by blood or land, and inclusion is in our cultural DNA. We should feel proud that we are not all the same, and that we can share our differences under the common umbrella of humanity.

INCLUSION—It's amazing what happens when we allow the flower that is us, the flower that is them, to become part of the bouquet.