Intentionally Inclusive Interviewing

Intentionally Inclusive Interviewing for Marriage Officiants:
Recognizing and Respecting Diversity

This training provides marriage officiants a framework to better understand and prioritize their clients’ identities and experiences. This will improve officiants’ interactions with couples and their wedding guests, leaving all parties feeling more empowered and included. This webinar includes examples that depict a variety of scenarios in which unconscious bias may occur and its impact on connections.

Learning Objectives 

• Define unconscious bias and the many forms it can take.
• Increase awareness of your own perspective, and how that perspective might influence relationship building, the ceremony, and the couple’s and guests’ experience.
• Understand the impact that bias can have on interactions with couples and their guests.
• Learn how to proactively and reactively manage situations in which bias occurs.
• Connect with couples in a more respectful and inclusive manner.

Pre-Learning

Please complete the following prior to the January 12, 2022 webinar:

• Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). Participants should take at least one IAT. (Duration between 10-120 minutes, depending on how many IATs are completed.)
• Verna Myers Tedx: How to Overcome our Biases? Walk Boldly Toward Them (Duration 18 minutes.)

Post-Webinar

We hope to offer an interactive follow-up training. We will survey participants to assess demand.

Take Training Here

Presenter: Karen DeMeola

Karen DeMeola is the Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration at the UConn School of Law and a past president of the Connecticut Bar Association. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from UConn and her JD from UConn Law. After graduation from law school, Karen was a civil rights litigator whose practice focused primarily on employment discrimination, police brutality and housing discrimination. While at UConn Law, she has been an adjunct professor teaching Critical Identity Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Legal Profession. Karen has provided training for not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, institutions of higher education, law firms, and other businesses on implicit bias, intersectionality, inclusive leadership, and diversity and inclusion more broadly.

Karen was the recipient of the Lawyers Collaborative for Diversity Edwin Archer Randolph Diversity Award; the CWEALF Maria Miller Stewart Award; the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities Constance Baker Motley Award for Business and Law; and the University of Connecticut Spirit Award.

Related Links

• Exploring our own implicit bias article with activities
• JPus Managing Member’s statement on racial injustice
• The Justice of the Peace Association’s Code of Ethics and our Core Values

Other Training

• Training about child and forced marriage for marriage officiants
• Making Marriages Accessible: Working with the Deaf