CATEGORY 4: CAMPUS CLIMATE AND PROGRAMMING Recommendation 1: Create a culture of dialogue and communication for diversity, equity, and inclusion by providing safe spaces, opportunities, and platforms for all members of the Trinity community. Rationale: Using the HEDS Climate Survey as a benchmark along with the Gallup employee engagement survey results, there is a need to develop a series of webinars, forums, round table discussions, channels of communication, and platforms for giving and hearing all voices inclusive of Black/African American Alumni that are conducted regularly throughout the academic year, available On Demand, and encouraged. Additionally, the university is void of any implementation of a University-wide communication plan to ensure sustained, fundamental change is being achieved. Internal communication is critical and dependent on institutional support as the university progresses along a continuum toward needed change. The University recognizes and aspires to move away from practices of segregation and assimilation to being committed to practices of acculturation and empowerment for those less empowered in positionality and responsibility. The university will further become an institution that implements policies and procedures in pursuit of a campus that fosters inclusive excellence for all students, faculty, and staff to feel welcomed, appreciated, and valued. Given the most recent surveys, interviews, and social media activity, there is an acute recognition that changing hearts and minds takes individual and collective work. Nevertheless, individuals have to be allowed to begin at different points in their journey toward achieving the goal of creating a culture of dialogue and communication around diversity, equity, and inclusion. This will require the University to acknowledge these varying degrees of student, faulty, staff, and alumni understandings. Programming, initiatives, and events should map toward this goal and while seeking to meet people where they are - pushing our collective community toward real, sustained change. This is the starting point for crafting the strategies outlined in this section. Helping students feel a greater sense of community and “belonging� has been identified as a core University initiative under the value of intentional inclusion - defined by the Retention and Graduation Task Force. This recommendation complements and scales the work that’s been outlined by the Retention and Graduation Task Force and seeks to move simultaneously in achieving the various goals in both reports. Stakeholders: Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Board of Trustees
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