Dear Campus Community,
To become an antiracist institution, each one of us must center antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion values in our day-to-day work. Every CC community member is expected to make ADEI a priority and contribute to the college’s antiracism commitment.
Rather than relying on one chief diversity officer to oversee this work, we intentionally built our capacity for inclusive excellence by creating an ADEI leadership team.
Thus far, our team has done remarkable work to tackle goals at the divisional level. We are now ready to take the next steps to significantly advance our antiracism commitment at the institutional level. This requires a reimagining of how we can do what we’ve done even better. Toward that goal, President Richardson and I worked with our ADEI leaders to restructure their roles to move beyond focusing on specific constituencies and individual programs and offices to more intentionally focus on systems and institutional transformation.
Peony Fhagen, associate vice president for institutional equity and belonging, Rosalie Rodriguez, associate vice president for institutional equity and belonging, and Ersaleen Hope, assistant vice president for institutional equity and belonging, will now be positioned to lead our institutional ADEI strategic planning and implementation. These leaders will collaborate with all college vice presidents to ensure antiracist initiatives are embedded within divisional operations and consistently assessed and updated. They will also make data-informed recommendations and propose solutions to address institutional ADEI challenges, while serving as divisional ADEI consultants as needed.
Beginning June 16, the ADEI leadership team will serve as members of the President’s Office and report directly to me. As another support to our institutional antiracism commitment, we’ve also contracted external consultant, Speak Truth, to work with the ADEI team and the vice presidents to create divisional ADEI goals and implementation plans. Much of that work is underway and will continue this summer.
As part of this transition, Ryan Bañagale, the ACM Mellon Leadership Fellow, will serve as interim director of the Crown Teaching Center. Christian Gonzalez will continue as director of the Butler Center.
Additionally, keep an eye out for a message from our ADEI leaders about Fall Conference 2023, which they will lead as we align our antiracism work to start the new academic year together in the fall.
Sincerely,
Manya Whitaker
Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff
