Undergraduate Academic Affairs (UAA) Race-Based Staff Caucusing

Our proposed project is to continue our caucus work and deepen our engagement and understanding of how anti-racism intertwines with resilience, compassion, and sustainability. Resilience and compassion have already been themes addressed in our caucus work but environmental justice will be a new area of focus. Our aim is to offer one expert-facilitated caucus session per quarter to both BIPOC and white identifying staff. 

The cost of one expert-facilitated caucus session is $2500. This seed grant will allow us to cover one quarter’s worth of expenses for both caucus groups. We will seek out funding for the other two quarters from the UAA Dean’s office and through UAA staff dedicating some of their individual professional development budgets (each professional staff position has up to $700 allocated per year) for the year towards these costs. 

Our goals overlap exquisitely with the goals of this seed grant: 

• to foster connectedness, belonging, and community;
• to embrace both commonalities and diversity within the human experience;
• to cultivate kindness, compassion, and gratitude toward each other and ourselves;
• to highlight connections between community/personal identities and sustainability in the UW community/environment;
• to spark dialogue about environmental and social issues that have a disproportionately negative impact on communities of color 

Caucus work is absolutely applied learning in that we are building resilience and skills in the sessions and then carrying that deeper learning and understanding out into our interactions with students and colleagues as well as in the ways we conceive of and structure our work. Caucus sessions will be open to all staff in UAA. Our hope is to have a minimum of 15 staff members at each session (we can have a maximum of 30 people per session) and to have the majority of participants attend all three sessions during the year. 

Sustainable Development

We believe our project overlaps with the following U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: 

#3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages Health and wellbeing are integral parts of how and in what ways staff show up to work. Caucusing asks us to be in our bodies and lived experience as we reflect on how race and racism impact us. Engaging in a caucus is a health and wellbeing practice for staff. It allows us to step outside of our work day to find resilience in ourselves, compassion for our colleagues, and to reflect on how sustainability impacts us. 

#4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all Caucusing continues lifelong learning for our staff and, as individuals who work in higher education, asks us to improve our practices to ensure inclusive and equitable education for our students. 

#5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls As staff, we bring our intersectional identities to work each day. For those of us who identify as women, caucus work calls us to reflect on how our race and gender impact us and those around us. For staff who do not identify as women, compassion and empathy can be developed through this reflective work. We cannot examine gender without also examining the role that race plays in our identities and in our work. 

#8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all Full and productive work and decent work for all requires that we, as staff, be able to bring our full selves with us each day. Because of inequality, we understand that the ability to do this is not equally distributed across all staff in UAA. Caucus work asks us to reflect on this injustice and create space for BIPOC healing and connection while asking white staff to reflect on their power and privilege and work towards creating more equitable environments for all to thrive. 

#10: Reduce inequality within and among countries A major goal for our anti-racism work is to address inequalities. This is also an area where sustainability and economic justice will be explored. Caucus work is expansive as the individual impact it has on a staff member ripples out to impact that person’s students, colleagues, families and communities. This work leads us towards addressing worldwide inequality. 

#16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels Our caucus work helps build towards having an effective, accountable and inclusive institution. Our work focuses on providing justice to all. As staff reflect on and identify the areas of growth and change needed within our unit, we work to build a wider work culture that allows everyone to have their needs met, engage in meaningful work, and create a climate of peace and inclusion.