Celebrating diversity as the Millennium approaches is the focal point of Bermuda College's diversity training programme.

Ernestine DeGraff, executive director of the Diversity Institute of Bermuda, spoke candidly on the programme which will be a year old at the close of the year.

"Diversity really basically means difference,'' she explained this week. "In the context of human behaviour, diversity refers to the standard of accepting, respecting, and valuing the differences of others.

"I like to think of it as a mosaic where you have different pieces. "They come together to make a whole and they make that whole beautiful.

"Where we are concerned, there are seven distinct areas that we look at in terms of diversity. They tend to be the areas that people have the greatest difference around. They are areas like age, class, disability, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation, all of those sorts of things that make us all different. Each one of us is different in our way.

"Learning to understand, respect and value these differences makes us a beautiful whole that we would want to be in terms of mankind.

"Diversity started here about five years ago. Dr. Argentine Saunders-Craig from the National Training Laboratory approached Dr. George Cook, the College president and asked him if he would be interested in having diversity training conducted here at the College. The programme was to be not just for the students at the College, but for Bermudians as well.

"The goal was to train 100 Bermuda residents in the area of diversity skills.

They would take those skills and filter them out into the community in whatever capacity they were from whether work, community organisation or home.

"Our first course began in 1995 and we ran two other courses in 1996 and 1997.

"By the end of 1997, people were feeling that they don't want this to end.

They were enjoying the experience. There was a lot of professional development and personal growth and people felt that we have got to move on. We've met the objective of training. We've trained 91 people officially, but we had others who were interested in portions of the training.

"But people felt we could not stop here,'' Ms DeGraff stressed. "There were too many needs in the community, so we conducted a future search project and out of that future search came the decision to develop a Diversity Institute.

"We had an action planning team that worked for six months and out of that team I came forth as the executive director.

"We chose four other persons to work with me that made up the interim board and in January of this year, we launched the opening of the Diversity Institute. We are a non-profit organisation and registered charity in Bermuda and so far, we have been able to make our presence felt on the Island by conducting seminars, and other types of training to local businesses, community organisations in the area of diversity.

"Currently we are conducting along with the NTL again an advance training course for 16 of the persons who had taken the original course.'' Ms DeGraff said the goal in training them was so that they could become sufficiently skilled to conduct training programmes throughout Bermuda without looking overseas for trainers.

"We feel that it is important to have our people fully trained and fully skilled so that they can do training here but also go overseas and be a part of training programmes there as well,'' she said.

"So far, it is a four-week session, once a month. A full week of intense training. It began in November, and continues in December. We are going to take a break in January and then complete the four weeks in February and March. We will do a practicum in April, where the people will have an opportunity to test their skills in the market with various organisations and groups.

"The membership of the group is a very diverse membership, comprised of a real diagonal slice of our community. Persons in executive positions, Government, private enterprise, homemakers, mixed by race and gender.

"We will be one year old in January. We feel pretty proud of what we've done, but we want to continue developing ourselves. And although we have a lot of growing to do, we feel very good about our first year.'' Ernestine DeGraff