Within the increased momentum of the social justice and inclusion movement of the last year, the IEP found inspiration in URI’s DEI 365 Symposium and Social Justice and Inclusion Module to do more and be more for its students. First and foremost, the IEP has earmarked $10,000 in donated funds to help retain and recruit underrepresented IEP students. Students will be eligible to apply for this funding through the College of Engineering Diversity office. Moving forward, support for this initiative will continue to be a priority for IEP fund drives.

The IEP team also pondered how it could effectively tie in topics of diversity, equity and inclusion into its extracurricular offerings, for being split over two colleges, it largely does not instruct its own courses. We started by reaching out during the fall to the individuals running both of the aforementioned JEDI initiatives on campus, Dr. Joanna Ravello, Director, Community and Organizational Development, and Safietou Sagna, Coordinator, Food and Housing Security. It was from them that we learned of Diversity Dialogues, a student-led group focused on educating their peers on important DEI issues, and reached out to see how we could partner with them.

After meeting with Carlee Kerr, one of the founding members of Diversity Dialogues and now a ‘21 graduate with degrees in History and Gender and Women’s Studies and a minor in Africana Studies, the IEP team was impressed at the level of professionalism, sophistication and intentionality that went into their facilitation of each of the webinars that they offered. We immediately decided to book out a couple of sessions with them for the Spring 2021 semester on the topics of impostor syndrome (March 2nd) and social identity, power and privilege (April 14th). Next, we sought sponsorship through the College of Arts and Sciences’ Event Funding and were excited to learn that we had been approved so that we could, in turn, offer our financial support for this important student group. It should be also noted that Diversity Dialogues is this year’s recipient of the A. Robert Rainville Student Leadership Award for their fantastic work!

While the virtual environment brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic complicated efforts to engage with students across the board, the IEP found that the participants who attended were actively engaged. Students told us that they got a lot out of these shared experiences; we even had some IEP alumni contribute to the content discussed and participate in at least one of the sessions. One of our overall goals was for students to see that these issues are universal – not only can learning about them help people individually, they can help one better understand the culture we live in here as well as how to navigate cultural differences and the unknown abroad. When providing other workshops related to intercultural communicative competence, we blended in some of the topics discussed during these two DEI events to drive home that point. To further encourage students to participate in events like these in the future and to integrate them into the fabric of our program itself, diversity, equity and inclusion has been included as a key focus area of the new IEP Leadership Endorsement program that we built out this year.