Goal 1: Campus Climate

In pre-campaign planning conversations with schools, colleges and units, the question often arises of how to diversify donor pipelines. During the first three years of its DEI plan, OUD encouraged development staff across all three campuses to diversify both donor and volunteer bases. As a first step, OUD leveraged its new policy on constituent affinity and identity information to diversify its donor base and direct donors toward DEI and other funds that speak to their interests, backgrounds and experiences. In Year Five, OUD continued its data acquisition, strategy and usage efforts to explore mitigating bias in wealth screening for prospective donors. With support from an ODEI Diversity, Democracy and Structural Racism Grant, our Prospect Development and Analytics team (PDA) and Data Science & Decision Support team analyzed in-house and vendor data to consider indicators that will help diminish bias in current wealth screenings, for instance accounting for U.S. history of redlining when using real estate data. Because of the project’s focus on both identifying untapped prospect potential and creating industry-leading best practices around wealth screening, it will have a direct impact on how OUD builds its campaign pipelines both in the short and long term.

During Year Five, Kinesiology served as the host of a three-part MLK webinar series sponsored by U-M Health Sciences units that focused on the topic “Where Do We Go From Here: Body Politics and Movement Towards Racial Empowerment.” The series was well attended and featured panel discussions, a keynote presentation, a recitation of creative writing, a mental health meditation and a movement demonstration of Afro-beats. Based on participant feedback, the sessions were informative and inspirational in illuminating the myriad ways in which bodies are racially politicized, and highlighting movement as racial empowerment. The webinars, which were both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, showcased the critical role of health sciences in addressing and combating racism in theory and practice to promote wellness social justice for communities of color.

The goal of building a truly inclusive process for DEI education began with five proposals that established a framework to administer educational opportunities for all COE faculty, staff, postdocs and students. Through community teams, subcommittee teams, townhalls, surveys, small-group meetings of the dean with students, faculty and staff, and focus groups, we brought together the diverse perspectives of administrative leadership, faculty, staff and graduate and undergraduate students, thus assuring that all constituents had an opportunity to shape the training, educational goals and modes of delivery. These and other efforts by the DEI Culture Shift Community Team led to the development of a Change it Up! Bystander Intervention workshop focused on stopping anti-Black racism. To date, more than 700 faculty, staff and students have participated. A DEI education and training model has been established incentivizing faculty and staff for their commitment to DEI, creates a formal mechanism to track progress toward creating and maintaining an environment where all people are valued and stresses the importance of DEI within the field of engineering.