DEIB Work at RRCC is Changing. The Goal for Inclusion is Not.

Making inclusion more than just a word takes big changes.

This year, that’s exactly the work that is taking place at Red Rocks Community College.

The college is growing more diverse every year and is now an emerging Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) That has prompted a renewed look at how RRCC welcomes diversity and encourages belonging.

So, this year, RRCC has created two new positions helping focus on inclusion, departments are starting to go through training for intercultural competence and the work of some committees is changing.

All of it is meant to ensure that everyone at the college feels a “shared responsibility” for the work of creating a welcoming culture and environment.

“The expectation is we all do some level of work in our position,” Dr. Landon Pirius, RRCC President, told all staff during fall kickoff. “I will hold my leadership accountable.”

The HSI committee is becoming an HSI Council with officers and bylaws – and more authority to make recommendations. The existing DEIBA council, meanwhile, is being asked to take part in the various workgroups that are forming to implement the work of the strategic plan – ensuring an equity lens in all the projects.

The advising and financial aid teams are among the first going through training – Intercultural Development Inventory, or IDI, in partnership with The Equity Project.

The training is one that President Pirius has already gone through himself.

Unlike one-size-fits-all training, IDI is customized. Trainers help individuals assess where they fall on a continuum — from not recognizing cultural differences at all, to actively adapting behavior across them. From there, participants receive coaching to move further along that continuum, both as individuals and as a team.  

To continue reflecting on that work in practice, other internal structures are being set up. One of them is with the creation of a new position, Director of Instructional Excellence and Development, to help guide professional development of faculty and instructors.

Joe Brenkert, who is taking on that role, started at RRCC this summer. Most recently he worked with the Colorado Department of Education. He’s spent much of his career as a math professor.

“I see this position as really helping our instructional side recognize their power, their influence and the impact they can have on all of their students,” Joe said. “Not just in their content area, but in the affirmation of students that they belong here and this is for them, and they do bring unique strengths to this environment.”

In a previous position at another community college, Joe also took on the role of helping other instructors look at their work through an equity lens.

One idea he implemented there that he said he might consider for RRCC as well, would be to have data workshops for faculty or instructors who want to sign up to dig into the pass rates for their classes, disaggregated, and compared to the school and system-wide data.

He noted one of the benefits of that approach was that it helped professors approach the issue from a data-driven perspective. Often, he said, professors believe they don’t have any issues with how they teach their classes, but sometimes the data helps them see trends.  

“We need to look at ourselves and be vulnerable enough to have those conversations,” Joe said. “I may not have lived the experience of many of my students but that does not mean that I cannot support them. It does mean that I need to acknowledge them and their challenges.”

The Focus for Students

A smaller project that took place this year was funded by the President’s Dream grant and involved sending business faculty to another type of cultural competency training to help them teach their students how to use that cultural competency framework in their own lives, and in business. The framework is named CQ, a framework measuring the ability to navigate across cultures. Faculty are now embedding CQ into all of their core business courses.

“We want students to feel like their backgrounds are assets in any space,” said Stephanie Schooley, one of the business faculty members. “Then it goes one step further to say how do we make a plan for skill building and how am I entering these spaces so I can be successful.”

Stephanie said students have quickly adapted the language of the framework and are using it to take ownership of their experiences as assets and as something they can take into the business realm to succeed.

And because one of the main goals of all this work is to ensure that students feel like they belong, another position was created to just focus on them.

“What we heard from our student government association is that we didn’t have programming specific for students,” Dr. Pirius, who regularly meets with student government leaders, said.  

So now, under student life, Freddy Sims, the new Coordinator for Belonging and Inclusion has a role specifically to connect with students.

Freddy said that being gay and Black, living in America, he struggled as a young adult.

“Navigating that was very difficult,” Freddy said. “If I had a mentor that process would have been a lot smoother, so I kind of want to be that person for others.”

As soon as he started at RRCC, Freddy surveyed students about their thoughts on existing spaces on campus such as the multicultural center in the hub.

“I heard that it didn’t feel like a space for them,” Freddy said. “They felt awkward walking through these office spaces to get to it and it felt like they needed to have permission.”

And students said it lacked engaging activities or programming.

So now, Freddy is working with a new small budget to set up programming to include leadership development for students, and is working with facilities teams to redesign the spaces, now called the Multicultural Center and the Pride & Ally Center. He wants students to be able to use the space not just to hang out, but also to find enrichment.

It may not lead to monumental shifts in the culture students experience on campus, Freddy said, but it’s an important start.

“All I can do is support the students and provide them a path to advocacy,” Freddy said.