In the 1997 State of the County Address, C. Scott Vanderhoef, County Executive, charged The Department of Employee Rights, Relations and Training with the mandate of researching, developing and implementing a Cultural Diversity Training Module for County Employees.

The training program selected is the module used by the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) of Washington DC. It was selected by Governor Pataki to train all New York State employees and is endorsed by all major labor unions.

The Department of Employee Rights, Relations and Training began implementing the training with a three-day Train-the-Trainer program of 44 volunteers from various County departments. It is geared toward providing leadership in ending discrimination, reducing inter-group conflict and building multi-group coalitions among County employees.

The training was conducted on June 22, 23, 24, 1998, at the Fire Training Center in Pomona.

The Department of Employee Rights, Relations and Training is charged with training all County Employees in the prevention of sexual Harassment in the workplace.

The Sexual Harassment Prevention Training was developed by the Center For Women in Government – SUNY Albany. Our trainers presented our employees with a definition of sexual harassment by using a formalized updated curriculum and video.

Because of recent changes in the law including same sex harassment, sexual orientation and expanded issues arising from Hostile Work Environment we re-trained some of our original trainers, trained new trainers, and implemented a new updated curriculum.