My achievement of the exemplary knowledge level in the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) competency is defined by my work in two major areas: training and facilitation expertise for the advancement of both students and student affairs professionals in the areas of social justice education & the successful development and implementation of programmatic initiatives designed to create more equitable organizations.
 

My interest in EDI is guided by my professional value of enacting social justice. As a growing student affairs professional, I continue to demonstrate a commitment to this value through continually educating myself regarding power, privilege, and oppression. I have attended student affairs professional conferences in order to advance my knowledge area in this competency. I was a scholarship recipient and participant of the 2010 ACPA social justice institute at Loyola University Chicago. Through this conference, I learned a great deal about systems of power and privilege and how my social identities shape my experiences. This past year, I attended the Global Queerness conference at the College of Wooster. Through my involvement in this conference I learned more about how multiple identities inform queerness as an intellectual and political movement. These experiences facilitated significant exploration of my identities as a womyn of color and help to inform the professional communities that I build and the initiatives that I develop.
 

As a social justice educator, I have infused this framework into a number of roles that I have had in the past two years. As a co-curricular activities manager at Brown University, I co-created and facilitated a social justice training for 100 summer student staff members. The training focused on how social justice should guide the interaction that our students have with the pre-college students that they work with. The training engaged students in an exploration of power and privilege and oriented them to resources on campus to continue developing this competency. The training culminated with students completing several case study exercises based on a variety of challenging situations that focused on supporting students with a range of social identities. Both the facilitation guide and presentation are attached to serve as artifacts to demonstrate this experience. 
 

During my work as a graduate resident director for living learning communities at Oberlin, social justice defined my supervisory style. I deliberately wove social justice education into interactions with the resident assistants I supervised. I successfully challenged students to reflect meaningfully on their identity as it relates to their residential programming. Furthermore, I supported students in developing creative programs that facilitated their resident’s further development of a social justice identity. Through emphasizing intersectionality and social justice through programming, German House successfully implemented an Afro-German series. The program took place in a residential community designed to promote greater knowledge of German and German culture. This space traditionally focused on language immersion and German literature and culture which ultimately emphasized White European German tradition. The Afro-German series consisted of two programs. The first event was a lecture from Tiffany Forvil, a doctoral student from the University of South Carolina whose research interest focuses on the role of women in the Afro-German movement. The second event consisted of a screening the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years with a discussion afterwards. Both events focused on the intersection of Africana diasporic identity and German national and cultural identity.
 

Through my practica as the Supervisor Liaison for the College Student Personnel program’s Interview days, I successfully implemented programming in order to support diverse student’s recruitment into our graduate program. Affinity spaces were designed to allow candidates the ability to build community around social identity. This programmatic intervention focused on supporting candidates that had marginalized identities and created space for these candidates to learn more about the experiences of  people of color, LGBTQ, and queer people of color within the Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) program. This ultimately displayed the HESA department’s ability to recognize the challenges, and offer prospective students a meaningful opportunity to connect with potential support networks of current students and young alumni from the program.   The facilitation guide I designed for the affinity spaces serves as an artifact for this experience.
 

In addition to supporting candidates, I developed educational programming that supported the hiring supervisors’ ability to successfully recruit and evaluate diverse candidates equitably. This programming consisted of a webinar that shared a variety of recruitment and evaluation resources in order to support supervisors successful recruitment of diverse candidates. Through creating this resource, I emphasized the Higher Education and Student Affairs Department’s commitment to diverse candidate recruitment and supported an ongoing culture of inclusion for a number of institutions.
 

Finally, I continue to share my knowledge as it pertains to EDI. This year, I was presented on Engaging Students in Creating Trans* Inclusive Community at the national ACPA conference in Las Vegas. The conference session focused on a queer and intersectional analysis of multiple initiatives on Oberlin College’s campus that supports the development of a trans* inclusive culture. The session presented a multidimensional and collaborative way to support gender non conforming students. The presentation proposal and PowerPoint presentation serve as an artifact for this experience. Through deliberately incorporating my interest in social justice education into my professional roles, I have effectively achieved an exemplary proficiency in the EDI competency.