DEI Update

Initiatives

This year, we embarked on evaluating progress related to the Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP), developing the second iteration of the DIAP, and creating a new DEI grounding document that will replace our Multicultural

Philosophy. We have been intentional about gathering feedback throughout these processes and will continue to, with the hope of rolling out both later this summer.

With many lessons learned from our first D&I Action

Plan, we look forward to implementing the second iteration with more attention to organizational change and collaborative action. We will be incorporating the

Equity Tank Model, a model developed by Student Affairs professionals who formerly worked at Towson University in residence life, and introducing this at DRL Connect.

Student Education & Engagement

This semester, we welcomed 12 new Peer Dialogue

Leaders who recently completed their 70-hour, 3-credit training internship. To conclude their experience, the

PDLs facilitated a variety of Common Ground dialogue sessions for residents.

Traditionally, the capstone experience for PDLs in training has been facilitating four-session dialogue groups with the RA Class. With the move to RA Groundwork,

Ben has worked hard to create new opportunities and partnerships. This semester, we worked with College

Park Scholars and coordinated 4 dialogue groups on a topic related to equitable food access and sustainability.

Sixty students from the Environment, Technology, & the

Economy Program participated in four-session dialogue groups, and it was a great success for our PDLs and the student participants.

Additionally, the newly-trained PDLs led one-session and two-session dialogues for the RA staff teams in

Oakland, Easton, Centreville, and Leonardtown. The topics for these dialogues were related to responding to non-inclusive speech in a university setting. We hope to continue offering one- and two-session dialogues for our student staff teams.

During the past few years, the pandemic and virtual classes and programming effected both our PDL internships and the number of Multicultural Advocates.

After growing to 6 in 2019-2020 (the program’s 2nd year), we had 2 MAs for the past two years. We are excited to announce that we will have 5 MAs for the 2022-2023 academic year! Our 5 incoming MAs are Adanna Kwapong, Ellie Lippa, Kaitlyn Kim, Lucas Rivero, and Natalie Davis. All of them are rising juniors who just completed PDL Training. We are still determining which residence halls they will be working with – be on the look out for more information in our D&I in Action Newsletter!

Staff Development & Training

Our highlights for Staff Development & Training related to DEI include engagement around the DEI theme of Cross-Cultural Engagement and our Coffee &

Conversation series. We had multiple sessions with the authors of Identity-Conscious Supervision in Student

Affairs: Building Relationships & Transforming Systems with our Leadership Team, at DRL Summit, and a DSA/

SADI Indaba. As we focused on identity-conscious supervision within the theme this year, we are excited to delve into our 2022-2023 theme, Identity-Conscious

Communication. This theme focuses on communication across differences, engaging with conflict across identity groups, and facilitation around identity-related incidents & issues. We will be sharing more about the upcoming theme at DRL Connect in July.

This year, we shifted our article discussion series from

Heritage & History Month discussions to “Coffee & Conversations”, borrowing a program from our

Multicultural Advocates and focusing on current issues related to DEI to discuss in community with each other. We held several this year in person and virtually, facilitated by many of our staff! We are very excited to continue this next year, and are working on a partnership with RecWell to collaborate on a few programs to bring our staffs together throughout the semester to discuss

DEI-related issues and our work.

Reinventing our housing program as a mostly-singles community

In addition to transitioning to a program of mostly single occupancy rooms, our staff bent over backwards to give flexibility to students and families navigating the decision about whether to live on campus or not last fall. We changed and/or extended our cancellation deadline at least five times and extended a guarantee of Fall 2021 housing to this year’s first-year students who preferred to live at home this year.

DEI Update

Our DEI Team and 4 committees (D&I Staff Development & Training, Student Diversity Programs, D&I Action Plan Steering Team, and DEI Grounding Document Taskforce) have been hard at work this year coordinating programs, facilitating trainings and discussions, evaluating progress, and further developing our programs. Below are a few highlights as well as things we are looking forward to next year.