Social Scientists Looking for Participants in DEI and Community Change Program

November 1, 2022 - Emily Jodway

Drs. Sarah Prior and Jennifer Carrera have been awarded funding through Michigan State University’s Institutional Diversity and Inclusion’s Creating Inclusive Grants program toward the development of a new project centered around the improvement of diversity, equity and inclusion in the campus community. 

Prior and Carrera, both assistant professors in the Department of Sociology, have developed a program titled New Community Leaders: A 12-Session Program for Advancing Understanding and Humanizing Across Differences. The duo is looking for participants who are experts, leaders and facilitators of DEI at MSU and are passionate about the advancement of inclusion among the campus community. 

The project is part of the further development of a more full-scale training that is intended to eventually become part of MSU’s faculty, staff and new administrator onboarding process. With this initial group, the team will use a participatory evaluation process to identify evaluation metrics and assure appropriateness of the program, and will use the evaluation and discussions with fellow DEI leaders to expand and advance this training. Three participatory evaluation sessions will be in addition to the program length of 12 sessions, for a total of 15 sessions.

“We invite you to participate and contribute to the development of this program that we hope will position MSU as a model for promoting equity and healing within our communities,” Carrera explained. “We hope that this workbook will become a scalable and transferable tool for building communities on campus who will advance the work of promoting equity and healing.”

Please contact Dr. Jennifer Carrera via email at jcarrera@msu.edu by November 7th to express interest in the program. Space is limited to 20 in-person participants and the first of 15 sessions began on Tuesday, November 1. A makeup session will be arranged for anyone who missed the initial meeting but can attend on November 8th. All meetings take place on Tuesdays from 12-1:30 in Berkey Hall. Calendar invitations for the specific dates and the room number will be provided to confirmed participants.

Learn more about the Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion (IDI) and the CIEG program here.