Equity Commitment

In 2020, the IAMNCC conducted a process of reviewing our strategic priorities to articulate critical equity commitments related to each goal and new equity-related objectives. This will now be a part of our annual planning process to ensure that all of our work aligns with our commitment to equity. 

Goals for Our Team:

• Build our capacity to effectively integrate equity and anti-racist practices into our work
• Support a culture of caring and belonging on our team and the ability to live out our mission

Goals for Our Network:

• Create space for self-reflection and learning
• Promote and compensate BIPOC, disabled, LGBTQ, and otherwise minoritized voices and plan events focused on building capacity for anti-racist action, decenter whiteness, and decolonize knowledge sharing
• Provide guides, tools and support on embedding and centering equity across the civic mission
• Put the safety, belonging, and growth of the people we work with first creating intentionally accessible, inclusive, and relevant events

Goals for Our Programs:

• Target support to under-resourced campuses and communities
• Work to ensure partnerships are co-created and equitable
• Design and redesign student programming WITH students of color and first-generation students
• Fund and support low-income, especially BIPOC and first-generation, low-income student leadership and co-creation with community partners
• Center stories and experiences that challenge dominant and exclusionary ideas about the civic mission and higher education

We are embedding commitments to equity and accountability mechanisms throughout our operations. This will be an ongoing process with the following current priorities:

• Diversify the board of directors in terms of identity (to include more people of color) and role (to include more community partners)
• Create a student committee to advise specific events and programs and give input to the board
• Collect demographic information on our programs for annual review and goal-setting
• Set specific goals and measures in our annual team and individual work plans for review quarterly
• Review goals and progress in each board meeting
• Share goals, progress, challenges, and failures in our annual report
• Create additional mechanisms for ongoing and meaningful stakeholder input

The narrative about what higher education is changing. As the identities and lived experiences of college students have shifted over the decades, institutions have confronted challenges in access and success and retention and persistence. At the core of these challenges and tensions lies a fundamental truth: institutions of higher education were built with the inclusion of certain students in mind and upon the exclusion of others. Definitions of merit, academic rigor, and other key aspects of the college experience have been constructed taking into account only a limited range of identities and lived experiences.

Mental health support, campus food pantries, and other basic needs resources are becoming essential to campus infrastructure. Students, faculty, and other members of campus communities are bringing attention to the “hidden curricula” and norms that first-generation students and other minoritized students encounter upon entering college. Addressing crises of retention and student success will require meeting students where they are at, and this requires recognizing how higher education has been built for the success of some students and upon the exclusion of others. 

We are at a point where institutions are increasingly touting values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, most institutions continue to fall short of operationalizing these values and fully reckoning with historical and ongoing legacies of exclusion and oppression. Increasing access by merely opening the doors to our institutions is not enough if we are to confront the systems and legacies underlying the challenges minoritized students face as they participate in higher education. Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have often reflected surface-level commitments founded in good intentions, but to actualize these values would require institutions to engage in an ongoing and critical process of self-examination and to pursue ecosystem-level change.

At the same time, the language and practice of community engagement and service-learning has often reflected a power dynamic that situations the “community” as in need and the “campus” as the savior. This reinforces colonialist notions of service and recreates mindsets that support oppression and injustice. Too often, we have engaged students in the community without asking them to reflect on history or context. 

As an organization, we have too often ignored these realities and upheld problematic models of engagement and service. We have excluded those without the means to participate and have not been intentional in our efforts of inclusion. We have limited the voices we hear and elevate to those traditional centers of power and knowledge and have not always sought to lift up the unheard and marginalized. This history compels us to reflect and to act.

As such, we began this process in 2019 with a goal of collaboratively and iteratively reflecting and acting together on this commitment. The board of directors and staff team have had many conversations about these commitments and values. We also surveyed our network in the summer of 2020 and provided an update on these commitments in our 2020 Annual Report.

In order to ensure clarity of purpose and understanding, the board of directors and staff worked together to create definitions of key terms and concepts underlying our commitment.

Diversity encompasses all aspects of human difference, but we are especially concerned with those that have served as a basis for exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization. To strive for “diversity” is to prioritize ensuring representation of and opportunities for people of color, LGBTQ+ people, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and disabled people, low-income people, and women across our staff, programs, and network. When we strive for diversity, we also aim to ensure that a wide range of ideological perspectives and religious and spiritual beliefs are represented in our programs. Our definition of diversity asks us to consider not only who is included and who is missing from the room, but to actively assess and harness our practices, policies, and approaches to create space for people of all identities and lived experiences to bring their whole selves to our communities and work. 

Our commitment to diversity compels us to…

1. Include and elevate different voices and perspectives through our presenter lineups at events like the Civic Action Academy and Student-Ready Summit
2. Create conditions that foster diversity through equitable recruitment, hiring, and employment policies and practices
3. Support our staff, members, and partners in developing intercultural communication skills

Equity involves making deliberate and consistent commitments to identifying, naming, and dismantling systems of oppression and injustice. It requires us to perceive and account for the interplay between historic and contemporary inequality and injustice. We strive for equity when we are honest about the history and enduring effects of racial, socioeconomic, and all forms of injustice. We aim to interrupt and dismantle the cycles and barriers created by these legacies, operationalizing our civic mission to redistribute representation and opportunity.

Our commitment to equity compels us to…

1. Support culture change on campuses and in higher education
2. Name and challenge the histories and continued perpetuation of inequality in higher education, AmeriCorps programs, and other relevant contexts
3. Prioritize supporting first-generation students, students of color, low-income, and other minoritized students through our programs
4. Center social justice issues on campuses throughout our programming and events

Inclusion is an intentional and active process of creating space and opportunities for individuals who have been historically excluded and systematically marginalized in higher education and its affiliated communities. Striving for inclusion requires us to account for our varying degrees of power and privilege and acknowledge how these shift in different contexts. We are committed to practicing radical inclusion, ensuring that every person is engaged, affirmed, and valued in our relationships, decision-making processes, leadership, and programming.

Our commitment to inclusion compels us to…

1. Challenge and reflect upon white supremacy workplace culture
2. Value different areas of knowledge and ways of knowing, especially lived experience
3. Meet our members and partners where they are at, offering services like health insurance and mental health benefits and working to accommodate different schedules, family situations, learning styles, and other factors
4. Dismantle or lessen the socioeconomic barriers that prevent people from attending our events and participating in our programs

“Full participation is an affirmative value focused on creating institutions that enable people, whatever their identity, background, or institutional position, to thrive, realize their capabilities, engage meaningfully in institutional life, and contribute to the flourishing of others,” (Sturm 2006, 2010). Our understanding of full participation prompts us to actively and intentionally apply our definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This requires continual self-examination, ecosystem-level analyses and approaches, and stewardship of shared ownership and vision.

Our commitment to full participation compels us to…

1. Include more diverse roles and voices on our boards and committees, especially community and students
2. Collect demographic information and include it in our analysis as we review feedback on programming and events
3. Center equity in our approach to building civic agency in students and AmeriCorps members
4. Support campuses in becoming “student-ready”

A key step for any organization in changing its culture and practice is to examine the values underlying it and intentionally set forth and hold ourselves accountable to values that promote the vision of the world we want to create. 

As our staff and board members reflected upon the values that shape our commitments to equity, several key themes emerged. Our discussions led us to conclude that our work centers around the values of community and connection and that our specific interpretations of these values drive our commitments to equity.

We recognized that our work is grounded in a core belief that all people should have access to quality higher education, and that this access is both a precondition and a catalyst for the civic mission. However, we also recognized that access is not enough to ensure success for all students. To actualize the civic mission, we cannot brush over the history, complexity, and injustice. We must recognize how the institutions and systems we represent and work within have excluded and exploited certain communities if we are to build equitable and inclusive institutions and communities today. 

We must recognize that our civic mission is grounded in beliefs and ideals that have not been fully realized in wider contexts and that even run directly up against the historic and current values and practices of higher education. Our values compel us to be rigorous, reflective, and intentional so that we might use our strategies and resources to dismantle injustice and lay groundwork for a more equitable and just future.

For years, our internal staff team has been guided by five main values including teamwork, passion for mission, commitment to equity, putting people first, and learning. As we developed our equity statement and strategy, we reflected upon how each of these values both reflects and compels us to strive for equity. Several themes emerged from these conversations. Staff and board members emphasized that these values reflect how highly we prioritize creating the conditions for community-building and belonging in our workplace and through our programs and partnerships. A draft of our values is below for further input and reflection. These values will guide our budgeting, strategic planning, meeting discussions, performance review, and more.

Embrace difference and complexity. To foster inclusion and belonging in the many contexts in which we work, we cannot brush over difference, history, and complexity. We must seek to include and affirm different identities and lived experiences, while also acknowledging and accounting for varying degrees of privilege and power. We must recognize how the institutions and systems we represent and work within have excluded and exploited certain communities if we are to build equitable and inclusive institutions and communities today. 

Prioritize rigorous learning and reflection. Our work requires us to act in ways that are consistently rigorous, reflective, and intentional. This includes how we reflect on our relationships, analyses, and approaches. We also prioritize seeking sources of knowledge and ways of knowing that have been marginalized and excluded from the dominant culture. We commit to pursuing that knowledge through deep listening and active reflection about what dominant ways of knowing have rendered absent. This value guides us to recognize that learning with and from each other is at the heart of what we do.

Work to achieve full participation. We strive for the engagement of everyone on our campuses and in our communities in every decision we make. Upholding this value requires targeting our resources to challenge and dismantle barriers to participation. It also requires striving to create cultures of community and belonging. To achieve full participation, we must put people first as we make decisions and take the time to build trusting and reciprocal relationships. 

Lean in to change. Higher education is steeped in tradition. While we do not seek to abandon important practices, we must cultivate a receptivity to adapting, asking questions, challenging norms, and embracing a different future. We thrive when we are working together toward shared goals and finding new ways of achieving our desired outcomes. This also means we must be willing to accept risk and failure as important steps to any learning and growth process.

Our staff and board members emphasized that living out these values requires us to think critically about individual, institutional, and systemic injustice. “Living our values” requires more than sustaining individual or team-wide commitments to certain behaviors and approaches—we must commit to using our strategies and resources to dismantle injustice and lay the groundwork for a more equitable future.