Mason City Chamber of Commerce launches program to promote inclusivity

MASON CITY — The Mason City Chamber of Commerce has started a new initiative designed to promote inclusivity in north-central Iowa. The “Building CommUNITY” program is featuring billboards as well as a new mural with the important message.

Chamber president and CEO Robin Anderson says with more non-white people coming to the area, inclusion is an important issue in north-central Iowa. “It’s really important for us to get the message across that inclusion is everybody’s job. It’s not just being inclusive at work, it’s being inclusive on your ball team, it’s being inclusive at the municipal band level, we just want to be known as the most welcoming community that there is.”

Anderson says it’s important for employers to show north-central Iowa is a welcoming place to be. “We really feel like with workforce attraction retention, our most critical community need, we need to make sure that we are a welcoming community to all types of people. We’re really positioning diversity, equity and inclusion as a workforce retraction attention strategy.”

Anderson says they are inviting all their Chamber employers to go through some steps to become a certified inclusive employer.   “We are rolling out specific steps, and then we’re providing to them a marketing package so they can market themselves to prospective employees as an inclusive employer. We also, knowing that we are going to have thousands of people in our community for RAGBRAI, we wanted to make sure that the mural and the billboards were up to demonstrate to those people that ‘hey this seems like a pretty cool town’. We have lots of jobs they could choose from.”

The Chamber hired local artist Zoie Papouchis to design a “paint-by-number” mural on the north side of the Community Health Center in the northern entry to the downtown area.  “We’re really happy that the Community Health Center agreed to let us paint a mural on their building. Teams of people are out there, and I would just invite anybody from the community who is interested in helping paint to get in touch with us.”

According to the 2020 US Census, the diversity of Mason City’s population stands at 93.17% white compared to 94.3% in the 2010 census.