A new program is helping to advance campus diversity efforts at the College of William & Mary.
The college’s Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity awarded Innovative Diversity Efforts Awards grants to fund six projects proposed by William & Mary faculty, staff and students to assist in the college’s diversity efforts.
The IDEA grant projects for 2014 address diversity through several different approaches, such as working with K-12 after-school enrichment programs to expand diversity training for student orientation leaders.
“We are excited to be able to fund six diversity initiative proposals this year,” Chon Glover, William & Mary’s chief diversity officer, said in a news release. “I look forward to seeing the work that will be accomplished with the execution of the grants.”
Some of the projects focus on students in the Hampton Roads area.
Amy Wilkerson plans to use her experience in with the college’s Applied Research Center to expose K-12 students at the Suffolk Boys & Girls Club to science and engineering principles. Wilkerson’s project would create a new outreach program for students affiliated with the club by giving them hands-on experience with a 3D printer.
Wilkerson said her project would help diversity efforts by bringing science education to communities that typically lack funding for similar programs.
“This experience will hopefully improve the students’ spatial reasoning skills and introduce them to engineering concepts such as material and structural strength,” she said.
Other projects focus on students at William & Mary.
William & Mary freshman Meghan Schilken hopes to address societal pressures placed upon women through her project.
Calling the project “Pressures of Perfection,” Schilken created T-shirts printed with statistics about self-destructive behaviors in young girls, and launched Twitter and Instagram accounts to advance the project.
“Through this piece, I hope to explain and coerce people to recognize that perfection is an unachievable goal that should not be placed upon a young woman as an expectation and that our culture needs to re-evaluate what standard are necessary and healthy to hold you women to,” Schilken said in the release.
Giana Castellanos, a junior at the college, proposed re-establishing the Mason Diversity Ambassadors program. Working through the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at William & Mary, the program would promote diversity in the business school by sponsoring networking opportunities, speaker panels and a high school outreach program.
A proposal submitted by senior Mary Beth Berg, graduate student Zara Sibtain and Director of First Year Experience Lauren Garrett aims to boost the college’s diversity efforts from the beginning of students’ time at William & Mary by providing additional training for orientation leaders.
The grant would fund the addition of a diversity awareness speaker for student orientation leader training, along with more rigorous diversity training.
“It is vital that we set a positive precedence for each individual we come in contact with right from the start,” the group said in their project proposal. “For many, that means being mindful to our differences.”
The IDEA grants are awarded annually. A full list and description of the 2014 grant projects is available here.
