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NC State National Coalition Building Institute

About NCBI

The National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) has conducted programs on hundreds of college and university campuses across North America and the Pacific. They have launched campus affiliates on sixty campuses where faculty, students and administrators have made an institutional commitment to using NCBI programs as a mechanism to provide an ongoing response to discrimination, oppression and handling controversial issues. More recently, NC State has become a member of the Carolina Coalition.

An NCBI campus affiliate is made up of a team of students, faculty and staff from various disciplines who provide a powerful leadership resource for the campus. The team provides proactive workshops to improve the overall campus climate for diversity by building a more inclusive environment and teaches how to effectively shift prejudicial attitudes and be powerful allies for one another. The team is also trained to intervene when tough intergroup conflict arises on the campus or between the campus and the community.

An NCBI affiliate begins with a three-day Train-the-Trainer Seminar. In this seminar, participants learn how to lead the award-winning NCBI Prejudice Reduction Workshop and learn the NCBI Controversial Issues Process. Following this seminar, a campus affiliate director is selected in consultation with the institution. The director serves as the liaison with the NCBI national office, provides leadership for the campus team and receives monthly telephone support and supervision from the national NCBI campus program director.

NC State launched its campus affiliate in March 2001 with thirty-three team members trained to facilitate the NCBI Prejudice Reduction Workshop.

Theory and Philosophy

The National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) has conducted peer training to transform communities and organizations around the world. These are the operational assumptions underlying NCBI programs:

  1. Training teams of peer leaders is the most effective way to empower people to take leadership in reducing racism and other forms of discrimination.
  2. Programs to welcome diversity require an ongoing institutional effort.
  3. The establishment of proactive training programs that build strong intergroup relations are more effective than programs that respond to specific incidents of racism or crises.
  4. Programs that welcome diversity need to include all of the visible and invisible differences found in a workplace or community.
  5. Diversity training programs that are based on guilt, moralizing or condemnation often rigidify prejudicial attitudes.
  6. Anti-racism programs are most effectively conducted with a hopeful, upbeat tone.

See the national NCBI website for more detailed explanations of each of these principles.

Community Crisis Response

The NC State NCBI team serves as a resource on campus in regard to bias-related crisis, controversy and community issues. Ways the team has reached out include providing specialized workshops, forums and listening tables to engage individuals in productive dialogue.  The NCBI team of trained facilitators is available to partner with departments, organizations or groups to create opportunities to effectively work through difficult conversations.