Diveristy at Riverland Community College

Diversity Awareness Month

October is Diversity Awareness Month, a national commemorative month initiated by Carole Copeland Thomas.  During this month, we seek to better understand the similarities that we share with others from diverse groups and to find ways to mend places where our differences may have caused problems for all of us.  Today, our campus, like our world, is more diverse than ever—something to embrace and celebrate. 

If the World Were a Village of 100 People

If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
51 would be male, 49 would be female
82 would be non-white, 18 white
67 would be non-Christian, 33 would be Christian
80 would live in substandard housing
67 would be unable to read
50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
33 would be without access to a safe water supply
39 would lack access to improved sanitation
24 would not have electricity (And of the 76 that do, most would only use it for light at night.)
7 people would have access to the Internet
1 would have a college education
1 would have HIV
2 would be near birth, 1 near death
5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
33 would be receiving--and attempting to live on--only 3% of the income of “the village”

Source:

If the World Were a Village of 100 People.  The Family Care Foundation. 2007. 19 Sept. 2008  <http://www.familycare.org/news/if_the_world.htm>.