A longtime professor at the College of Southern Nevada, Joni Flowers has always valued education.
About two decades ago, Flowers decided to use some of her expertise to start the Cultural Diversity Foundation, a Las Vegas nonprofit organization focused on educational opportunities for those from disadvantaged populations.
While its name suggests services only for those from certain ethnic or cultural backgrounds, Flowers said the foundation serves anyone with a desire for upward mobility.
One of the foundation’s most popular offerings is its Affordable Computer Training Program, which provides students lessons in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, along with other basic computer applications.
The program has more than a dozen courses available, which typically run for a day or two.
The courses range from $160 to $260, but the foundation frequently provides scholarships.
Several other scholarships for higher education programs—up to $2,500—are awarded annually. The foundation also offers learning opportunities for those who want to know more about the broader process of applying for scholarships to pay for higher education.
“The cultural diversity aspect comes in by us embracing our entire community,” Flowers said. “We’re open to everyone. Our message is that diversity is more than just ethnicity. We’re not race-based. Our scholarships are open to everyone.”
One recent scholarship winner is Janise Wiggins, a social worker and entrepreneur by trade who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UNLV. In 2019, Wiggins decided that she wanted to go back to school as a candidate for a public affairs doctoral degree at UNLV.
“Once I got accepted into the program, I had to figure out how to pay for it,” Wiggins said. “I started working with a scholarship coach who pointed me to the Cultural Diversity Foundation scholarships.”
She wound up receiving a $1,500 scholarship, which she used mostly for textbooks.
At first, Wiggins didn’t put it together, but she later remembered that she had taken advantage of some of the foundation’s services years earlier when she received some QuickBooks training for her grant-writing small business.
Like Flowers, Wiggins values education. That’s something she said was instilled in her long ago by her mother while growing up in the LA area.
“My mother had me when she was 14,” Wiggins said. “She always reinforced two things in me—get your education and don’t become a teenage mother. Neither one of my parents went to college, and I had no idea how I would be able to afford to go to college, but somehow God was able to put me in places where I was able to make that happen.”
As with many other businesses and organizations, the Cultural Diversity Foundation continues to work its way back from the depths of the pandemic.
The number of people serviced by the foundation was down following the onset of the pandemic, but Flowers said she hopes to have around 80 students complete the computer training courses this year.
“When the pandemic hit, everything just stopped and we were struggling,” Flowers said. “But I’m blessed to have an incredible board to help me knock on doors to see where some resources were to keep our doors open.”
Likely partly due to the shakeup of the hospitality workforce in Las Vegas in 2020, Flowers said a lot of previous hotel and food and beverage workers have been on the lookout for additional training.
“A lot of the people we’ve had enrolling recently have been students who were exiting hospitality,” Flowers said. “Beyond maybe the POS [point-of-sale] system, a lot of these people didn’t have to have computer skills training. With our training, we start off with PC basics.”
Wiggins said nonprofits like the Cultural Diversity Foundation are an important part of the fabric of the greater Las Vegas community.
“The nonprofit sector, and organizations like the Cultural Diversity Foundation, are important for the Las Vegas community,” Wiggins said. “Not one sector can do it all. The government can’t do it all, the faith-based community, and the for-profit community, can’t do everything. If the nonprofit community were missing, the overall community would feel it.”
It’s a community that Flowers has come to love and appreciate over the years. Originally from Indiana, she moved to Las Vegas in 1980 when her military stepfather was stationed here.
“When I came here with my family, we had no major freeways and a lot more desert in Las Vegas,” Flowers said. “Now, we’re a major, and very diverse, U.S. city.”
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