Seed Grant Award: Keeping the Momentum

The goals of the project are to 1) implement a newly created equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiative ("Keeping the Momentum”), designed to collectively identify core values, goals, and actions to combat institutional racism and promote social justice at CBCH and CUIMC more broadly, 2) evaluate the initiative and its implementation, and 3) disseminate our approach to other academic research units. To implement Keeping the Momentum, we have begun surveying faculty and staff at each stage to elicit core EDI values, goals, and potential actions, as well as perceptions of current CBCH climate (e.g., hiring, promotion, community engagement, mentorship) with respect to EDI. To assess impact, we will measure changes in faculty/staff perceptions of EDI at CBCH from pre- to post-development. We will also assess faculty/staff satisfaction with implementation of our (collectively crafted) EDI mission statement and action plan. Specifically, we will evaluate comfort discussing institutional racism in the workplace, perceptions of our research center as anti-racist workplace, perceived dedication to EDI, and perceived disparities in opportunities and recognition. To facilitate dissemination, we will manualize our approach, create a repository of our staff/faculty surveys, and operationalize lessons learned (including program efficacy). All proposed activities will be approved by CBCH faculty and staff, to ensure that we have consent for distributing any data that were collected for internal quality improvement (as we have done since the initial phase of anonymous surveying of faculty/staff perceptions). If we receive consent, and the program is successful, valuable to other divisions/cost units, we will work with CUIMC Media Relations to consider broader dissemination.

This project was funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.