One argument for diversity is that it ensures participation and creates the power of being heard. It is expressed by the popular maxim, “Nothing about us without us.” Implicit in this idea is the concept that those outside must come inside in order to ensure that their self-interest is served.
There is another way of understanding the value of diversity. It does not focus on the importance of the outsiders gaining equal participation. Instead, it focuses on the benefit the outsider brings to the group. It recognizes that, in welcoming the stranger, the group becomes more powerful by adding the outsider’s capacity.
At least five kinds of group benefits can occur from “welcoming the stranger”:
These five community benefits are unavailable without diversity, and achieving that diversity depends upon groups practicing hospitality. As a practice, active hospitality requires an invitation to the outsider and the stranger – an offering to become associated with us in many, many ways.
One of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute’s wisest Stewards was Judith Snow (1950–2015), an inclusion advocate with a physical condition that eventually left her wheelchair bound with only the power to move the muscles in her thumb and face. To most people, she said she was a strange outsider, but to anyone who had met her, she was the wisest person they had encountered.
Judith said most community groups look inward, their vision obscured by the wall of like-mindedness. That is why, above all, they should have a “welcome at the edge.” Otherwise, they will never receive the gifts that only strangers can bring to their group.