{"id":459,"date":"2019-03-10T05:20:28","date_gmt":"2019-03-10T09:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/?p=459"},"modified":"2019-03-10T05:20:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-10T09:20:28","slug":"a-conflicted-past-a-promising-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/2019\/03\/10\/a-conflicted-past-a-promising-future\/","title":{"rendered":"A conflicted past &#038; a promising future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By Naly<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In order to move forward, we have to first acknowledge what we&#8217;ve been through and use it as a motivating source.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When first learning about the South Africa Social Impact Seminar course, I remember thinking how amazing of an experience it would be! What a great opportunity to possibly affect development in a country rich with history, with complicated roots, but yet still striving to move forward and grow in equality and diversity. Throughout my life, I&#8217;ve always been passionate about counseling people through their journey of personal and professional development. A recurring conversation that I have is that in order to move forward, we have to first acknowledge what we&#8217;ve been through and use it as a motivating source. I saw this field seminar as a chance to help an organization do the same within a country that has overcome so many challenges and is still striving to move forward.<\/p>\n<p>While researching South Africa&#8217;s evolving democracy and growing diversity, I was often curious about how much of an effect apartheid has had on their current business culture and development. I went about digging into research with a &#8216;this is how it happens in the U.S.&#8217; mentality and wondered if the residue of their history would be as obvious as ours. Diversity &amp; Inclusion (D&amp;I) is now such a large part of today&#8217;s business climate in the US that&#8217;s it&#8217;s become normal to have D&amp;I conversations regularly. I&#8217;ve thought, well these types of initiatives\/conversations might be what is needed in South Africa. I had to remind myself though that having pre-conceived notions about what the diversity and inclusion efforts should look in SA wouldn&#8217;t be fair. It&#8217;s taken a fair amount of time for the US to give D&amp;I the attention it requires. Although, South Africa is a strong and confident country, it is still healing from a not so distant painful past.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m looking forward to experiencing cultural differences by actively listening, watching, and learning while visiting these organizations.\u00a0 Observing what they&#8217;ve been through &amp; having an understanding of where they are looking to go is the best practice in creating social impact within their organizations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Naly In order to move forward, we have to first acknowledge what we&#8217;ve been through and use it as a motivating source. When first learning about the South Africa Social Impact Seminar course, I remember thinking how amazing of an experience it would be! What a great opportunity to possibly affect development in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12084,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12084"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/socialimpactblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}