Equity and Inclusion Engagement Fund

Faculty and Staff Projects

ACPA/ASHE Presidential Symposium

September 29, 2023 | Virtual

The increasing polarization of the United States is being showcased by policymakers across the country through attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in both practice and scholarship. While these attacks have real implications for our work in higher education, they also have real implications for our own humanity and that of our peers and students, both current and future. The 2023 ACPA-ASHE Presidential Symposium will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn from practitioners and scholars about the short-term and long-term implications of the current political climate, examples of professional and personal resilience, and discussions about the potential paths forward.

The Power of Friendship: A Dialogue with Christo Brand

November 1, 2023 | Old Chapel

Christo Brand, author of “Doing Life with Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend,” visited UMass for a public audience lecture in the Old Chapel with a book signing and reception to follow. Brand offered a rare glimpse into Nelson Mandela’s resilience, wisdom and humor through the lens of the unlikely friendship that grew between the two men over the course of Mandela’s imprisonment at Robben Island and Pollsmoor prisons in the late 1970s and 1980s. Brand’s visit was co-sponsored by the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Office, the Office of Equity and Inclusion and the International Programs Office.

26th Annual LLC Student Conference

November 29, 2023 | Furcolo Hall

The Language, Literacy and Culture (LLC) annual conference is a collaborative effort that is sponsored by students, faculty and staff from the Bilingual, ESL, & Multicultural (BEM), Reading & Writing (R&W), Bilingual and Dual Language (BDL) and Language Literacy, and Culture (LLC) programs in the College of Education. This year’s theme is “Go for Broke”: Confronting the Politics of Educational Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Drawing inspiration from James Baldwin’s 1963 essay, “A Talk to Teachers.” The conference's aim is to provide space for students to share how they construct new knowledge about what it means to develop curriculum and research designed to fight against injustices and inequities in the 21st century.

Enhancing Accessibility, Inclusion, and Community Engagement through Dialogue and Reflection using Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem Framework

Our project, rooted in Deepa Iyer's "Social Change Ecosystem" book and framework, will engage 20 participants from diverse university roles, including staff, faculty, and students, in monthly dialogue sessions. These sessions aim to align participants with social change values, clarify their roles, and effectively engage with the broader social change ecosystem. The sessions will address racial trauma, nurture personal missions, and lay the groundwork for promoting inclusivity through social justice work within the Honors College.

Beyond the Classroom: Building Comunidad among UMass Students and Bilingual Families in Holyoke

This project aims to support bilingual families in the community of Holyoke, train future professionals in the field of speech and language pathology and promote a sense of belonging among bilingual UMass students. It also seeks to increase community engagement for bilingual individuals within and beyond UMass. This project has two intended audiences. First, dual-language learners with and without disabilities and their families. The goal is to provide bilingual language and literacy activities for families and their children. Moreover, we aim to offer support and resources related to language development, language facilitation strategies, special education, access to school resources, and other topics depending on their needs. In the past, families have requested topics related to self-care, feeding disorders in children, learning new skills (e.g., cooking, gardening), sexual education, and so forth.

Second, graduate and undergraduate students. The goal of integrating graduate students is to provide them with experiences in the community with dual language learners. There is a critical need for bilingual speech and language pathologists who have the cultural and linguistic competencies to serve this population. Therefore, giving students the experience of practicing with the community in real-time could be beneficial for their future careers.

Retreat for Multicultural Greek Council

The primary objective of this retreat is to provide a healing space for students who have experienced unintentional harm and to directly confront concerns such as the development of chapters operating in silos, fostering a false sense of communal identity, and racial and cultural divide within the broader Greek Community. The retreat also aims to address the challenges faced by predominantly South and East Asian MGC chapters in engaging in meaningful intergroup dialogues about race, identity, and culture, both among themselves and with interested students. Bilal Badruddin is currently the Director of Alumni Relations at Howard University and has published numerous Higher Ed articles on culturally based organizations on how to mitigate risk to foster better student engagement. By hosting Bilal on campus, it will allow SFL to begin a journey towards forming a stronger community amongst students of color from a student leader perspective.

Creating Inclusive Classrooms in Engineering Education

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the CEE Department Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee seek to invite external facilitator to give a workshop for faculty and a seminar talk for faculty/postdocs/graduate students on inclusive teaching practices in engineering education in Spring 2024. This is in recognition of a need for more connection and belonging in the class experience expressed by students, particularly important in retention of students historically underrepresented in the field. Faculty in the CEE department have also expressed a desire for additional strategies, tools, and frameworks they can use in their classes to foster this sentence of belonging and teach for inclusiveness. We plan to focus on engineering education, as requirements of ABET and the content we teach is unique, and researchers, professionals, and educators have focused on the specific needs of inclusive teaching for engineering. We plan to host a speaker who could spend a day at UMass and host a faculty- specific workshop (targeting CEE faculty, but with an open invitation to all faculty in the College of Engineering), as well as give a seminar to a broader graduate student /postdoc audience who may be interested in teaching careers.

Community Listening Sessions on Latinx & Indigenous Community Reading Rooms

To support a proposal to dedicate spaces in the Libraries to Latinx and Indigenous Community Reading Rooms, we are inviting listening sessions of Latinx and Indigenous students, faculty, staff, and community members as well as students and scholars who study these communities to engage with one another about their needs and hopes for library spaces. We have organized two sessions for each community. We plan to have about 10 participants at each of these four sessions. These rooms are meant for both interaction with library resources and places for communities to gather and exchange knowledge relevant to their communities. These rooms are intended to increase feelings of belonging for these communities at UMass and in the surrounding community. Because of the focus on the needs of these communities, it is essential to get their input into the design of the spaces.

Student Projects

BUILD Technology Impact Consulting

October 10, 2023, to May 10, 2024, Weekly | Integrated Learning Center

BUILD Technology Consulting is the premier software development and strategy group at UMass Amherst. Given OEI's resourcing for the Fall 2023 semester and beyond, the BUILD Leadership and General Body Membership will be able to serve social enterprise clients across the Amherst area.

Food Fair

November 18, 2023 | Worcester Dining Commons

The Vietnamese Students Association’s annual Food Fair serves as a platform to showcase the rich Vietnamese cuisine and culture to the UMass community. It brings together both Vietnamese and non- Vietnamese students in celebrating Vietnamese heritage. The appreciation of homemade Vietnamese delicacies like goi cuon, banh trang nuong, and che banh lot, truly foster a sense of cultural exchange. VSA takes pride in presenting an authentic portrayal of Vietnam's culinary roots, paying tribute to the diverse cultural backgrounds within the student body.

Diwali Event 2023

November 20, 2023 | Student Union Ballroom

We are excited to present our proposal for a vibrant and culturally enriching Diwali event scheduled for November this year. Diwali, also known as the Festival of Lights, is one of the most significant and widely celebrated festivals in India, symbolizing the victory of light over darkness and the triumph of good over evil. Our event will not only provide a cultural experience but also foster a sense of community and inclusivity among students, faculty, and staff of diverse backgrounds.

Afroball: Traditional Met Gala

November 30, 2023 | Student Union Ballroom

AfroBall is the biggest African event here at UMass every year. The African Student Association works to emphasize the beauty and the importance of African culture to the world. We take pride in our community and want to share this culture with the whole student body through our event. AfroBall is an annual event that has gained significant popularity within our campus community. The event is set up in a way that involves everybody for African pride. Starting with the host, we encourage this person to fully engage in African culture, through jokes, questions, and any valuable information we carry through our culture. This event also showcases African culture through a fashion show, live music, questionnaires, traditional food (or at least somewhat related to African culture), vocal performances, and dance performances (with a special performance from our dance team, Afrodites). The theme for this year’s event is related to each and everyone’s personal culture, where we encourage every student to showcase their culture in their outfit. With 54 different countries in Africa and over 3,000 different tribes and cultures, we want everyone to share a part of their culture to represent how rich our beautiful continent is.

Arab Cultural Night

December 1, 2023 | Campus Center Auditorium

Join us at Arab Cultural Night! The highlight of our academic year, this event fosters cultural awareness and provides everyone with the opportunity to intimately engage with our vibrant heritage. The audience will be entertained with captivating performances, including a lively dabke dance and musical showcases–all accompanied by a delightful array of Arab cuisines. It offers the Arab members of our community a chance to not only express themselves but also to promote cultural understanding and create a welcoming, inclusive community for both Arab and non-Arab individuals who wish to engage with and support the cultures throughout the Middle East and Northern African region.

Noche Latina

December 7, 2023 | Campus Center Auditorium

Noche Latina is a cultural event showcasing Latinx culture on our campus. Latinos Unidos (LU) strives to bring a diverse audience to UMass Amherst to connect with one another through a night full of culture in food, performances, and live music.

Christmas Celebration (KSA x JSA)

December 8, 2023 | Student Union Ballroom

The KSA x JSA Christmas Celebration will be a joyous time for members of KSA and JSA to relax, mingle and have fun during this precious holiday. We will be hosting craft activities and various games while encapsulating Christmas in East Asia in a night of spending time with our UMass family.

TCSA x VSA Good Luck! Winter Celebration Event

December 7, 2023 | Herter Hall Room 227

UMass Taiwanese and Chinese Students’ Association is hosting a collaborative event with the Vietnamese Students Association on campus to wish for good luck and fortune for the upcoming final season and new year! From the famous Chinese and Vietnamese traditions, our general body members are going to have symbolic arts and crafts activities of tying the lucky knots and decorating the bamboo pot with celebrative colors, such as gold and red. Both the knots and bamboo represent the cultural symbols of both Chinese and Vietnamese heritage while interacting through the activities will strengthen the bond between both student organization’s general body members. We welcome everyone in the UMass community to celebrate with us!

Multicultural Night

December 8, 2023 | Campus Center Auditorium

The Student Government Association's annual Multicultural Night is an enriching diverse celebration that gives the UMass students a glimpse into the traditions and practices of the vast cultures present here on campus. In collaboration with all cultural registered student organizations, we highlight each one of them throughout the night to showcase the riches and importance of a fully engaged student experience in relation to their ethnic and racial backgrounds and creativity. Through a variety of traditional dances, artwork, and music, we celebrate one another and lift each other to heighten the presence of belonging for every single student here on campus. We also provide a comprehensive and enriching cultural menu, allowing students to try new foods and drinks from all over the world. At the end of this event, students leave learning something new and feeling much more connected to our diverse student body.

Biology Undergraduate Research Club

This program's main goal is to increase knowledge and discussion around scientific research with an emphasis on how to get a variety of students involved with it. The Biology Undergraduate Research Club (BURC) is a space for students to meet and discuss scientific research. The club is intended for students interested in learning more about research on campus, getting involved, and connecting with other students and faculty.

Our Campus, Your Truth

College is a time for self-discovery and is often when people begin to uncover the truths they live by. The vision behind filming the “Our Campus, Your Truth” docuseries is to engage with the various microcosms at UMass Amherst and amplify diverse student viewpoints on "truth" in a deeply authentic and engaging manner. "What is Truth, and where do you find it?" We plan to frame this question to students on campus and explore where their answer takes us: creating rabbit holes right here in the UMass community. For instance, if someone says they find truth in science, we will talk to students/staff/faculty working in research labs. We will then pose the same question to them. If a student in a research lab finds that they find truth in religion, we will go talk to religious groups on campus, furthering the rabbit hole. We aim to showcase a diversity of beliefs in our docuseries: creating a comprehensive record of what students with a variety of experiences and backgrounds hold to be intrinsically true about the world. This docuseries, both in its process and in its finished state, will spark conversation between conventionally separated groups of the student body. By encouraging people to reflect on truth, we hope to remind them about what they share with each other at the core. Moreover, we hope to inspire more constructive actions towards an equitable and inclusive campus with our documentary, as clarity in truth is the first step towards creating positive change in the world.

Faculty & Staff Projects

Meetups at The Salon

February 20, 2024 to March 15, 2024 | Design Building Gallery

Make Space in the Salon is an event, exhibit, and environment to support mentoring, held in the Design Building Gallery over three weeks. Here, we invite students faculty, staff, practitioners and allies to join forces around a common table. Through a series of individualized events for different affinity groups, this space will serve as a catalyst for personal to professional growth. By using mentoring tools, sharing resources and stories, and forging new connections across demographics, we will work to open space and time for mentorship.

Catherine Coleman Flowers Public Talk

February 29, 2024 | Student Union Ballroom

The College of Humanities and Fine Arts will be hosting Catherine Coleman Flowers on February 29th, 2024, as part of HFA's Black History Month Celebration. She will be giving a keynote presentation with a moderated Q&A, free and open to the public. Coleman Flowers has dedicated her career to fighting for environmental justice, especially for Black, Latinx, indigenous and poor rural communities in the United States. She is the Vice Chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow for Environmental Health Advocacy, as well as the Founding Director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice.

Future of Belonging

March 23, 2024 | Design Building Gallery

This grant provides support for two "Future of Belonging" workshops led by writer, director, and social activist, Rebecca Brown Adelman. The workshops will be part of the interactive exhibits taking place at UMass in November 2023, The Futuring Lab, and March 2024, Y3K: On Distant Keys, envisioned and curated by artist and Department of Architecture Associate Professor, Sandy Litchfield. With students and staff members acting as creative practitioners, the workshops will cultivate agency and bring community members together through play, understanding, and action. In this way, the workshops and exhibits will expand our capacity for imagining futures that are both resilient and enlightened where investing in relationships across differences is essential.

Juniper Festival

April 5-6, 2024 | Commonwealth Honors College & Herter Hall

The Juniper Festival, revived a few years ago, allows the UMass MFA community to meaningfully interact with its community partners, such as the Amherst Survival Center, the Recovery Center of Northampton, Paperbark, Sustainability Initiative (campuswide), Hampshire County Jail outreach, local presses, local adult learners, UWW, Mount Ida. This year’s festival is part of the MFA’s sixtieth anniversary celebrating The Writer in Community.

Giving Voice to Adoption

The title of our project is “Giving Voice to Adoption.” This will be a photo exhibit of adoptees with each photo having an accompanying oral and written narrative about what it means to be adopted. Although times have changed, bio-normativity is still an issue for members of the adoption community. Therefore, many adoptees live a life of secrecy and sometimes loneliness as it relates to their adoption identity.

This project will proudly give voice to those in our community who are adopted!

Interdisciplinary Disability Symposium

Disability studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field. At UMass Amherst, disability-related research and teaching spans nearly all colleges. Yet without a disability studies department or cultural center to organize cross-campus gatherings, there are relatively few opportunities for researchers (students and faculty), instructors, and advocates to come together to discuss their work. This symposium would expand upon existing resource groups for disabled faculty, staff and students, to offer a professional opportunity to showcase scholarship. This is critically important since many researchers/instructors focused on disability experience isolation within their own disciplines. In other words, most researchers/instructors do not have colleagues within their own departments that share the same background knowledge and interest in disability. The symposium will be a half-day event with components like student poster session, student oral presentations, an invited keynote speaker, and breakout groups with representatives from disability-focused groups.

Building Community for Public Leaders

March 29, March 30, & April 2, 2024| Student Union

This grant funds three key activities: a fireside chat with female members of the governor's cabinet, a luncheon with the director of educational equity from the National Women's Law Center, and a "rest to rise" workshop to help students to recharge, reframe and reclaim collective power. These activities are designed to instill confidence in participants, to teach them the importance of community, and to provide supportive spaces for them to explore careers in fields where women are traditionally underrepresented.

Student Projects

The Inaugural W.E.B. DuBois Invitational Poetry Center

February 23, 2024 | W.E.B. DuBois Center, DuBois Library 22nd Floor

This Inaugural event is an invitational poetry slam hosted by Lyrical Faith Poetry in collaboration with the UMass Library W.E.B. DuBois Center is an event to celebrate Black poetry, Black History Month, and the birthday of W.E.B. DuBois (February, 23rd 1868). A poetry slam is a competitive event where spoken word artists perform poems in front of a live audience and are judged by 5 audience members using scores that range on the scale of 1-10. This poetry slam will be composed of undergraduate and graduate students across campus and community members. The competitors will be poets of color encouraged to share pieces on culture, identity, history, and themes pertaining to the legacy of W.E.B. DuBois. An award-winning spoken word artist will be invited to headline the poetry slam by providing a body of their work in between rounds. The event will be hosted by award-winning educator, activist, spoken word poet and UMass Social Justice Education doctoral student Lyrical Faith (Imani Wallace).

This poetry slam comes at a time where Black creative expression is of peak importance in our society. At the turn of the decade, American society has seen Black communities across the nation advocate for the significance of all Black lives amidst constant attacks on Black bodies. Black students at UMass Amherst comprise less than 5% of the campus population. There are various statistics that display the silencing and lack of visibility Black students receive on campus through programming, class content, and staff/faculty members. Providing programming that centers Black bodies and the stories of students of color legitimizes the Black experience on campus and allows students to see themselves represented in the work.

Femmes in Forestry

March 3-4, 2024 | Cadwell Memorial Forest

As part of the Femmes in Forestry initiative, we are providing a femme chainsaw training in the spring. Learning how to operate a chainsaw safely and effectively is an important skill but can be nerve racking to first learn, particularly in a male dominated setting. Our femme chainsaw training will provide a safe and supportive environment for forestry students to gain confidence with this skill set and make connections with the greater community as the training will be held in partnership with the Woman on the Land extension program.

Liberation Education Conference (Project #LiberationEd)

This conference is intended to be an inaugural daylong symposium highlighting two tracks to explore how educators and organizers can incorporate artistic modalities and social justice pedagogy into their own practices with youth or community engaged activities. The program will consist of panel discussions, workshops and a keynote speaker. The intended audience would be students and other attendees interested in the arts as a form of activism, community organizing, and urban education. The event's purpose is to empower participants with the insight and methodology to utilize these practices through impacting the spaces they serve. Furthermore, it will validate the significance of arts education as a necessary modality to activate social change for marginalized voices.

Between the Lines Poetry Open Mic Series

Bi-Monthly| New Africa House

"Between the Lines" is a bi-monthly poetry open mic and poetry slam series designed to enrich minority UMass Amherst communities. “Between the Lines” is imagined to be an outlet for students of color, queer students, immigrants and international students, disabled students, and neurodiverse students. This initiative not only provides a platform for self-expression but would also integrate a two-hour writing workshop before each open mic event.

Japanese Spring Festival

March 29, 2023 | Student Union Ballroom

The Spring Festival is the biggest annual event for the Japanese Student Association, bringing together diverse groups to immerse themselves with cultural experiences through a variety of Japanese foods and traditional activities. Our primary purpose of this event is to extend a warm invitation to our communities by encouraging participation, inter-club collaboration, and activities derived from traditional Japanese culture within an inclusive and festive environment. Emphasizing our commitment to inclusion, we are open to students from the Five College Consortium to join in the celebration. This year, we are hoping to enhance our annual Spring Festival by relocating the event to the Student Union ballroom, extending an array of Japanese food options and featuring guest performers. This year's Spring Festival will have a City Pop theme that was inspired by the vibrant spirit of late 1970s-1980s Japan, the room will be decorated with neon lights and paper lanterns to evoke the traditional Japanese festival atmosphere called matsuri. The City Pop era dances hand in hand with a vibrant era of economic growth in Japan, perfectly harmonizing with the nation's embrace of Western influences. This cultural whirlwind spun during a time of speedy transformations and sheer prosperity. Moreover, its timeless nostalgic charm has triumphed over the years, striking a chord not just in Japan but all around the world. This year, we're thrilled to sprinkle some extra joy into the Spring Festival.

Mother Tongue

February 28, 2024| Carney Auditorium, Furcolo Hall

Mother Tongue is inspired by the experiences of First Generation ensemble members, their families, and communities who are from Congo/Tanzania, Bhutan/Nepal, South Sudan/Darfur, Holyoke, and Springfield, Massachusetts. The 90-minute performance weaves together movement, music, dance, and stories in Arabic, Swahili, Nepali, and English. The piece incorporates themes of language, culture, identity, diaspora, hypermasculinity, xenophobia, transphobia, racism, the school-to-prison pipeline, and revolution.

(Re)imagining Black Futures: Intersectionality and Coalition-Building for Reshaping Black Realities

April 27, 2024| Amherst Room/Hadley Room, Campus Center

Join the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies for its 2024 Graduate Student Symposium "(Re)imagining Black Futures: Intersectionality and Coalition-Building for Reshaping Black Realities" on Saturday, April 27. Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members, and independent scholars will gather to discuss and explore the interconnections between politics, history, literature, and culture within the framework of envisioning the future of Black communities and Black Studies.

37th Annual Cape Verdean Cultural Night

March 30, 2024 | Campus Center Auditorium

Every year the Cape Verdean Student Alliance hosts its Cultural Night, a night dedicated to commemorating Cape Verdean culture and the achievements of Cape Verde and the Cape Verdean Diaspora. This event is attended not only by students but

Student Projects

Period Kit Drive

This project aims to support girls, women and menstruators to manager their period with safe menstrual products and education on reproductive health. A lack of safe products and adequate information about this normal biological process places shame, fear, stigma and can have health risks on a menstruator.

With support we can bring together our UMass community to participate in a Menstrual Health Management training program and run a period kit drive campus wide to collect safe and clean period products which can be donated to schools, shelters and to departments across campus.

Language Love Project

The Language Love Project aims to increase sense of belonging in international UMass Amherst students through language. In its first round, the project will come up with five simple phrases or questions that express positive affirmations or a simple question. Those phrases or questions – or the ideas behind them, because things aren’t said the same way in different languages – will be made available in 7-10 languages other than English and posted at five different campus locations with vinyl letters on windows so that the campus community and visitors can see them. Each of the five locations will have one phrase or question in the 7-10 languages. The idea behind the project is that the presence of your language increases feelings of belonging and inclusion, especially when you’re far from your home community where that language is spoken. At the same time, for the people who don't speak the languages, they are reminded that members of our community do speak languages other than English and that is something to be aware of and to celebrate.

Cultivating Agricultural Policy Innovators (CAPI)

September – December 2024

Cultivating Agricultural Policy Innovators (CAPI) is a historical internship program sponsored by the Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences (MANRRS) chapter at UMass Amherst in collaboration with the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative (MFSC), a non-profit organization that supports collective action toward an equitable, sustainable, resilient, and connected local food system. CAPI interns will conduct paid research on current agricultural policy issues, shadow MFSC staff in field visits and legislative meetings, and produce media communications. Alumni of this program will graduate with unparalleled professional readiness to work in a variety of fields, ranging from government, agricultural advocacy, natural resource management, environmental conservation, and non-profit work. UMass - MANRRS will host workshops, guest lectures, and symposiums to further enhance the interns' skills and network. We look forward to a new generation of historically underrepresented leaders in agricultural and environmental policy.