Hopefully, you have followed our posts this week, and seen that SELCA is working through the ideas on this great listicle daily, as a way of supporting Black Breastfeeding Week . . . It’s time for #5!
#5) Utilize promotional and marketing materials that are reflective of the community. Engage and co-create with members of the community to develop marketing and promotional materials. If community members are not available, seek out individuals that resemble the community.(Stacy Davis, BA, IBCLC, ILCA.org Guest blog post)
At SELCA, we don’t really use promotional or marketing materials, so it might have been easy for us to just mark N/A and move on, but that isn’t what we wanted this week to entail. Babies and families of color face difficulties that they can’t simply ignore, and we want to focus on how we can support them (not just this week, but all year round). Skipping the question seems, well, too easy, and not in the spirit of the week. 
So . . . what we did was take a look at how we are engaging and reflecting ALL of the communities, particularly focused on those historically marginalized or under represented. While we don’t collect demographic information as part of membership, come to our meetings and see that we are, indeed, a diverse group (and this includes our leadership). However, it has recently come to the attention of the board that we could do a better job of making people of color feel welcome. As mentioned yesterday, we are going to actively focus on partnering more with organizations of color, and we hope that our meetings will grow to reflect that inclusiveness. More than just hoping . . . I would like to challenge each of our members to specifically invite a colleague of color, so that we can be more supportive, one person at a time.