Goal 1: Campus Climate

The goal of this staff-initiated, multi-year, team project was to create a set of online fact sheets that supplement the Office of the Provost’s list of religious holidays, sent annually to faculty and staff. Each sheet includes a brief description of the holiday, a link to an online pronunciation guide and a sidebar featuring holiday dates, appropriate greetings, dietary restrictions, unique observances among various sects and other facts. Due to the magnitude of the project and a challenging timeline, additional UMSI staff were recruited to complete the project. Collaborating remotely over many months, the team worked with local religious leaders to verify facts—providing draft materials in different formats to facilitate editing. By better understanding how religious holidays are celebrated, these fact sheets foster mutual respect for faith observances within our diverse community and help advance U-M’s goal of creating a more inclusive and welcoming campus. In Summer 2021, the project team, led by Executive Assistant to the Dean Barb Smith, was recognized with an annual UMSI DEI award.

Link here to view the fact sheets along with project highlights.

During Year Five, Kinesiology served as the host of a three-part MLK webinar series sponsored by U-M Health Sciences units that focused on the topic “Where Do We Go From Here: Body Politics and Movement Towards Racial Empowerment.” The series was well attended and featured panel discussions, a keynote presentation, a recitation of creative writing, a mental health meditation and a movement demonstration of Afro-beats. Based on participant feedback, the sessions were informative and inspirational in illuminating the myriad ways in which bodies are racially politicized, and highlighting movement as racial empowerment. The webinars, which were both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, showcased the critical role of health sciences in addressing and combating racism in theory and practice to promote wellness social justice for communities of color.

The goal of building a truly inclusive process for DEI education began with five proposals that established a framework to administer educational opportunities for all COE faculty, staff, postdocs and students. Through community teams, subcommittee teams, townhalls, surveys, small-group meetings of the dean with students, faculty and staff, and focus groups, we brought together the diverse perspectives of administrative leadership, faculty, staff and graduate and undergraduate students, thus assuring that all constituents had an opportunity to shape the training, educational goals and modes of delivery. These and other efforts by the DEI Culture Shift Community Team led to the development of a Change it Up! Bystander Intervention workshop focused on stopping anti-Black racism. To date, more than 700 faculty, staff and students have participated. A DEI education and training model has been established incentivizing faculty and staff for their commitment to DEI, creates a formal mechanism to track progress toward creating and maintaining an environment where all people are valued and stresses the importance of DEI within the field of engineering.