Office of the Mayor

Group Responsibility

Like any large city, Riverside is both a community and the home to many smaller communities, such as extended families, neighborhoods, schools, religious institutions, ethnic organizations, youth groups, and diverse affinity associations. A key to Riverside's future will be our ability to develop a balance between unity (a collective sense of community) and diversity (the inevitablity of smaller communities).

1. In their best sense, groups serve constructive purposes in the lives of their members.
2. While it is natural for groups to aggregate, this sometimes escalates into de facto self-segregation.
3. To avoid such self-segregation, members of all groups need to make efforts to build intergroup as well as interpersonal bridges that strengthen social cohesion, reduce misunderstanding, foster intergroup learning, and forge bonds across group lines.
4. To achieve such goals people need to be willing to venture out of their group comfort zones and experience the cultures of others.
5. In crossing lines it is vital to recognize that all groups have their special values, concerns, beliefs, emotional attachments, collective experiences, communication styles, and senses of identity.
6. Such experiences and interactions can provide us with opportunities, as groups as well as individually, to share differences, discover commonalities, and draw strength from each other.
7. Whatever our group attachments, we all need to realize that a more inclusive community necessitates the building of intergroup partnerships and the development of common goals.
8. For such a community-building process to succeed, all groups must have the opportunity to give voice to their hopes, concerns, perceptions, experiences, values, and beliefs...in short, enjoy the right to be heard as well as accept the responsibility to listen.