Introduction

This chapter provides reasons why public and non-profit professionals need to be culturally mindful communicators. First, the demographics of the communities that people serve are changing. Second, the demographics of organizations are changing. In order to provide effective services in the face of these changes, it is imperative that public and non-profit professionals become skilled in communicating across various cultures in a mindful manner. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, public and non-profit organizations in the United States started to acknowledge the importance of cultural diversity in the workforce and in communities. The concept of social equity was explicitly stated as an important core value in public administration at the first Minnowbrook Conference, held in 1968. The demographic changes illustrate the partially attributed to the forces of globalization. Globalization refers to the processes of international integration, and the increase in permeability of traditional territorial borders shaped by the interchange of both tangible and intangible factors.