In the article “Celebrating EDI in the Industry,” several industry leaders were nominated for their work in the industry.
However, we didn’t have room for everything. As such, three of those nominated leaders share additional equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work and programs they are doing at their universities here.
Allie Bogard
Coordinator of Intramural and Club Sports, Montana State University
“Outside of the departmental collaborative events, I focus on training and development for student employees and club sport officers. This included a leadership series on cultural competency for student supervisors utilizing the NIRSA EDI resource guide and its cases studies to talk through situations regarding race and/or gender identity, and identifying personal implicit biases that may create inequitable officiating. In Club Sports, we have implemented a variety of educational trainings. These include suicide prevention, bystander intervention and LGBTQ+ Safe Zone trainings with various campus partners. These were available to all club sport student athletes in our program. As a result, we had 150-plus unique students participate in one or more of these developmental opportunities.
“Additionally, for both Intramural and Club Sports we have implemented a gender-inclusive participation policy that allows an individual to participate based on their gender identity. Along with the policy, we removed CoRec rules with point differentials and gender requirements in our league sports. We have created divisions by level of competition — competitive and recreational — instead of gender. Gender inclusive policies are paramount to engagement for LGBTQ+ students on our respective campuses.”
Kris Covarrubias
Assistant Director of Marketing, Communications and Public Relations, Boston University
“EDI work and efforts are central to everything we do at Boston University’s Fitness and Recreation Center. Our mission is to enrich the university and local communities by providing unparalleled and inclusive educational and recreational programs, services and facilities to promote physical, social, and emotional health and wellness.’ However, this doesn’t happen without our thoughtful and deliberate efforts in these areas. We want all our participants to not just feel welcome, but to feel a true sense of belonging in their class or their club sport team or in the pool or fitness center — or even when they just walk through our doors.
“Identifying a need for and creating a comprehensive, department-wide EDI initiative in itself was our first step. Programs had been incorporating inclusion efforts into their individual areas. But realizing the critical need for department-wide action motivated us to form our own internal EDI committee. Just organizing this team and creating a strategic plan for our vision was a really important process for us. We had so many passionate individuals with wonderful ideas. However, we needed to first create a plan based on our mission and values that would guide us.”
Read about the plan here.
Kevin George
Director of Campus Recreation, Rowan Thrive Well-Being Committee, Rowan University
“Although the pandemic decreased the size of our department by two-thirds, we provided a semester long series of EDI educational sessions to our student employees. Through utilization of guest speakers, having our own staff lead discussions, virtual breakout rooms and reflection exercises, we were able to have meaningful discussions about various topics including EDI and social justice terminology, implicit bias, identity wheel and intersectionality, privilege, anti-ism, and cancel culture. These topics were then reviewed later in the semester in area meetings and one-on-one meetings with student staff.”
