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2020-21: Cohort 5 —— New Strategic Initiative Awardees
Strategic Initiative: USD Goal Toward an International/ Multicultural Experience for all Undergraduate Students
Project Contact(s): Denise Dimon, PhD, Associate Provost for International Affairs, Professor of Economics, School of Business; Chris Nayve, JD, Associate Vice President for Community Engagement Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 5: Amplifying Local and Global Engagement and Reputation Monetary Award Category: a) less than $25,000 About: Approximately 50% of USD graduates study abroad, compared to 10% nationally. USD consistently ranks in the top 10 universities nationwide for this statistic. In addition, approximately another 30% of USD students engage in multicultural experiences such as cross-border engagement or community engaged learning in the San Diego area. This initiative seeks to research why the remaining 20% of students do not study abroad or engage in a multicultural experience in the hopes of making this a graduation requirement for all undergraduate students. The project also seeks to identify additional opportunities for engagement. Major Successes in 2020-21: Thus far, the project has been able to determine the various sources of global and multicultural experiences available to USD’s undergraduate students so that a complete assessment can be designed to track participation. The next step will be to design focus groups and surveys to determine what barriers exist which might be limiting participation. After barriers for participation have been identified, then programs and policies can be developed for their removal.
(projects that will receive funds for FY 2022 and FY 2023) Strategic Initiative: Torero Gateway: Expanding Concurrent Enrollment Opportunities
Project Contact: Stephen Pultz, MA, AVP Enrollment Management Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 1: Enhancing Student Learning and Success
Monetary Award Category: c) $50,000-$74,999 About: Equal access to educational opportunities (educational equity) remains one of the most pressing challenges facing the United States today. Right here in San Diego, there are significant disparities in educational opportunities across different neighborhoods. In poorer neighborhoods, where the majority of students are Black and Latino, limited access to college counseling, advanced placement courses, and other “college access skills” often result in a culture that does not “aspire” to higher education. This proposal seeks to leverage and enhance the relationships USD has been developing with community organizations (Ocean Discovery Institute, MANA Hermanitas, Reality Changers, Urban League Project Ready, Barrio Logan College Institute, Kearny High School-USD Upward Bound, High Tech High Elevate, etc.) to enroll 100 students from local high schools and community colleges each semester into USD’s dual enrollment program. The funding will offset the costs of application fees and tuition (which is currently only $75 per class), but more important, it will allow USD to provide textbooks and other class materials, and cover transportation costs that often are barriers for these students. Additionally, the initiative will develop a campus support network of faculty, current students, and staff who will guide and advise these students during their semester. The goal is to develop a program where students who participate in the Concurrent Enrollment program and attend USD eventually become mentors for students coming from the same organizations and local communities. This will have the added benefit of providing USD current students with leadership and mentoring opportunities. By expanding USD’s dual enrollment program to this level, the initiative hopes to begin seeing more local students consider USD for their college choice. In addition, USD will further advance its reputation as an anchor partner among local high schools. Strategic Initiative: Advancing Educational Equity: Enhancing Retention and Graduation Rates for USD’s Black Undergraduate Students
Project Contact: Ashley C. Barton, EdD, Director of the Black Student Resource Commons
Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 2: Strengthening Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice
Monetary Award Category: c) $50,000-$74,999 About: The initiative consists of four components that aim to advance the retention and graduation of Black undergraduate students at USD. Those four components are: a) the Black Summer Immersion Program, a) the Black P.E.E.R. Mentor program, c) Continuous Onboarding Opportunities, and d) the Sequential Developmental Program. For the Black Summer Immersion program, the funding is used for meals, to hire a temporary residential student staff member, group engagement activities, and for a faculty stipend. The funding for the Black P.E.E.R. Mentor program is utilized to provide grants to mentors and provide book stipends to mentees. For the Continuous Onboarding program, funds are for programs and initiatives aimed at supporting Black students’ transition into USD with a strong focus on their first semester; these include initiatives and programs aimed at identity development, academic preparedness, and community building. Finally, for the Sequential Development Program, funds are used for day trips and retreats aimed at building a sense of belonging, further developing student confidence, and developing constructive social support systems. Strategic Initiative: Water Justice Exchange: Fostering Synergistic Research, Teaching, and Solutions for Local Water Challenges
Project Contact: Marissa Forbes, PhD, Research Associate, Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 3: Improving Structural and Operational Effectiveness Monetary Award Category: d) $75,000 or more About: Challenges connected to water are a result of injustices, ones that intersect both social and environmental impacts. Water justice is embedded and specific to historic and socio-cultural contexts and includes but transcends questions of distribution to include those of cultural recognition and political participation, and is intimately linked to the integrity of ecosystems. The San Diego region faces multifarious critical and complex water justice issues, symptomatically manifested as trash and sewage pollution in the Tijuana River watershed, wetlands that need restoring and protecting, contamination necessitating remediation, and a call to climate change readiness, to name a few. Additionally, historic inequities in San Diego’s zoning and planning laws have long term public health implications, but also can exasperate challenges in the face of a changing climate. The initiative seeks to create and launch an inter-campus, inter-community synergistic exchange to advance our understanding of and innovative solutions to our critical local water justice challenges. The Water Justice Exchange (WJE) is designed to foster collaborative multidisciplinary research, student experiential learning, policy creation (advocacy), and community projects at the nexus of water, social, and environmental justice in the San Diego County and Tijuana region. Specific areas of focus include: water quality, water security, water reuse, water remediation, water justice, water policy, environmental resilience and climate change adaptation and mitigation related to the watersheds and coastal waters in the region.
Strategic Initiative: Committee and Implementation of College Diversity and Inclusion Mid-Career and Junior Faculty Service Awards
Project Contact: Farrah Karapetian, PhD, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts
Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 4: Elevating Faculty and Staff Engagement Monetary Award Category: a) less than $25,000 About: The strategic initiative will create an awards committee to develop criteria, procedures, eligibility, and an application process for two antiracist service awards at USD (a Mid-Career Diversity Service Award and an Early-Career Diversity Service Award), as well as fund the first two years of the awards in three units across campus: the College of Arts and Sciences; the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering; and the School of Leadership and Education Sciences. The awards will recognize the labor dedicated to diversity mentoring work, as well as preventing and combating anti-Black racism and promoting racial consciousness on campus. Further, the funding will be used to support the expansion of these awards across all units of the university, demonstrating the value of a university-wide award.
Project Contact: Lisa Nunn, PhD, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Educational Excellence
Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 4: Elevating Faculty and Staff Engagement Monetary Award Category: d) $75,000 or more About: This initiative seeks to create a Cross-Campus Racial Equity Advocates Program. The Advocates Program will increase equity and compensation to those currently performing work critical to the university’s stated goal of strengthening diversity, inclusion, and social justice across campus. The Advocates program is innovative because it for the first time explicitly recognizes and rewards Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty members and staff for the additional labor they perform combating anti-Black racism and promoting racial consciousness on campus, and tangibly values the experience, expertise, and perspective that they bring to all corners of university life. The Advocates Program comes with monetary compensation as well as a title that can be recognized in rank, promotion, and tenure decisions and annual merit and performance evaluations. Such structures are rare in higher education today. Research on higher education demonstrates that many colleges and universities undervalue and overlook the labor that BIPOC faculty members, staff, and administrators do to foster diversity and inclusion in their campus cultures. For example, faculty of color are saddled with greater student mentoring demands, greater teaching demands for courses that tackle challenging racial content, as well as greater service demands (as many committees, panels, etc., seek to be racially diverse), all the while facing microaggressions in everyday campus interactions alongside lower student evaluations compared to their White counterparts. These demands drain BIPOC faculty member’s time and energy, which makes them vulnerable to having lower scholarly productivity, lower job satisfaction, and risk of burnout. This can negatively impact hiring and retention rates of BIPOC faculty
members as well. The initiative funds will be used to create a stipend for a team of seven Racial Equity Advocates and for funding of Advocates’ programming initiatives. Strategic Initiative: Developing a Mentoring Program for Supporting Success and Retention of a Diverse Faculty
Project Contact: Sandra Sgoutas-Emch, PhD, Professor of Psychological Sciences
Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 4: Elevating Faculty and Staff Engagement Monetary Award Category: b) $25,000-$49,999 About: Faculty of color as well as women faculty face unique hurdles in the academy that reduce their likelihood of climbing the academic ladder/reaching tenure and promotion. Moreover, past interviews with faculty at USD at-large have reported feeling overwhelmed and unsure about how to successfully navigate the many aspects of their careers including what courses to teach, how much research is enough, and selecting appropriate service options. Although work has been done to help rectify this, studies have shown that quality mentoring experiences are important indicators of success and retention of faculty members. The initiative seeks to create a formalized mentoring program for faculty members. The proposed mentoring program is designed to provide resources and tools to support a diversity of faculty with an anti-racist perspective. The initiative includes training modules to help support and sustain a faculty mentoring program that can be designed and implemented across different academic units. Evidence-based practices as part of the mentoring program will include training programs for mentors / protégés and chairs of departments, implementing accountability measures, applying a developmental approach to address the changing needs across one’s career, and mentor mapping to match needs with different types of mentors. Strategic Initiative: Anchor Entrepreneurship: Combining Inclusion, Diversity, and Food and Beverage Innovation for Our Common Home
Project Contact: Rachel Lozano Castro, MPA, Director of the Small Business Development Center Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 5: Amplifying Local and Global Engagement and Reputation Monetary Award Category: b) $25,000-$49,999 About: During the coronavirus pandemic, entrepreneurs, and in particular restaurant owners, have been hit harder than most industries due to thin operating margins, high labor costs, perishable inventory, and the toughest pandemic-related restrictions. This initiative seeks to support vulnerable entrepreneurs, while creating experiential learning opportunities, care for our common home, and a transition from basic survival to wealth generating enterprises by helping female, newAmerican, and non-native-English speaking restaurateurs become consumer packaged goods manufacturers. The initiative includes four related components that center around food innovation: a) create a program to support restaurants, b) use data from the State of Diverse San Diego Entrepreneurs survey to expand and promote small business directories (could be food and non-food innovation related, but with a focus on local entrepreneurs), c) offer case and relationship management by peers and advisors that represent the targeted communities along the journey of business growth and, where possible, the path to contracting with USD and partners to USD, and d) access Native-language courses in lean start-up and other related topics. This proposal will increase our bridges to work in USD’s core anchor neighborhoods, further bridging our “town to gown” and anchor strategies with focused pathways to access. The anchor neighborhoods for focused outreach will be Linda Vista, City Heights and (bi-national) Tijuana, Mexico. Pending demand, we’d also like to do outreach to USD’s tribal partners via USD’s Tribal Communities liaison. Strategic Initiative: Design Thinking Studio
Project Contact: Juan Carlos Rivas, PhD, Associate Director of the Changemaker Hub Main Strategic Goal Alignment: Goal 5: Amplifying Local and Global Engagement and Reputation Monetary Award Category: c) $50,000-$74,999 About: The COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement, and the ongoing economic recession have exacerbated the importance of these issues as we as a society come to terms with the ways in which racial injustice impacts each of these challenges. Across campus, we have observed an increasing number of students who have become more aware of these urgent challenges and are activated to not only learn about these challenges, but to also engage with them. Students have a desire to explore and identify solutions to the challenges they learn about in their classes and through community immersion; however, many lack the skills and methodology to engage creatively, and explore, ideate, and co-create potential solutions in partnership with the community. The existing programs for student interaction and engagement with the community provide space for personal and classroom reflection, yet these spaces could be more impactful — for student learning and for our community partners — by incorporating design thinking. This initiative seeks to create a Design Thinking Studio at USD that will provide the space, tools, and methodologies to engage in creating institutional and local change concerning urgent global challenges by bringing together students, faculty, community partners, and organizations to collaborate in resourceful and innovative ways.
