Equity Summit

Equity Summit

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 Equity Summit 2025

Friday February 14th - 12:00-5:30pm - Tyler Haynes Commons

The Equity Summit is an event that creates space for faculty, staff, and students to participate in informed dialogue on global issues surrounding equity with a focus on its impact on our community. This year's theme is “Love and Justice: A Recipe for Social Change.” The theme aims to highlight the intersectionality of love and justice in social equity, creating space for participants to imagine how they might incorporate these ideas into social justice work on and off campus.

We invite the community to participate in the entire summit which is from 12:00pm-5:30pm. The Equity Summit will kick-off with a catered lunch and keynote speaker; following that we will move into our concurrent sessions facilitated by fellow spiders, and then a reflection reception that will allow participants to reflect on what they learned and share with others. If you cannot join us for the entire summit, we have created an intentional experience where participants can enter at any point and leave with a hightened awareness of equity on our campus.

We hope that members of our community will come to the Equity Summit with an open mind, willing to learn and dialogue about new topics and experiences centering equity.

 

Equity Summit Agenda

All Equity Summit events will take place in the Tyler Haynes Commons

12:00-1:05pm: Equity Summit Kick-Off Lunch and Keynote

Join us for a catered lunch as we kick-off the 2025 Equity Summit in the Alice Haynes room. We will hear from UR alum class of 2020 Hijab Fatima, and co-creator of the Equity Summit. Our keynote speaker Roscoe Burnems will discuss the important intersection of love and justice within a community and the role it plays when having difficult discussions.

1:15-2:45pm: Concurrent Session Block 1

Participants may choose one session from each block to attend. 

  • Love & Justice: Finding Joy in Relationships when the World is on Fire 
    • Facilitators: Kaylin Tingle, Ava Humphries, Lauren Yim, Daniel Polonia, Cori Fitchett, Charlotte Mercer, Grace Berry, Jasmine Redeemer, Eunkyung Ahn 
    • Description: We all exist in relationships with ourselves, each other, and in our communities. Healthy and unhealthy relationship dynamics can exist in all types of relationships, and practicing healthy relationship skills is an act of love that can help move us toward justice. Simultaneously, we are all human and have the capacity to harm and be harmed. When we practice boundaries and accountability in relationships (romantic, friendships, family, community, etc.), these are acts of love and justice. In this session, we will engage in skill-building and reflections to better understand our individual and collective wants, needs, strengths and areas of growth in working towards love and justice with ourselves, each other, and our communities.
  • Beyond Accommodation: Rewriting the Narrative of Disability in Social Justice 
    • Facilitators: Monti Datta, Beza Mulatu, Cort Schneider, Bella Tome, Steph Bird
    • Description: Our workshop welcomes and challenges participants to view accessibility as an act of shared care and responsibility, emphasizing that equitable spaces benefit everyone. Some 16% of the University of Richmond community identifies as having a physical and/or mental disability. Our intention is to inspire the campus community toward greater access to insight and accommodation. Through dialogue and collaboration, attendees of this session will explore how the intersection of love and justice can inform tangible changes in the spaces we inhabit and the systems we uphold, fostering a culture where equity is not optional, but essential.
  • Students as Partners: Educational Justice Through Partnership 
    • Facilitators: Gabriel Matthews, Kylie Korsnack, Ted Zhou, Ainsley Forrest, Lorena Campos-Castro, Aida Lette, Shobhini Kumar 
    • Description: In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, bell hooks defines love as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust,” and she argues that building relationships based on love is essential for pursuing justice in the classroom. In this session, we will explore this understanding of love and pedagogy and investigate how love and justice can be woven into the fabric of education through inclusive pedagogical practices. By the end of the session, you will leave with practical tools to advocate for inclusive practices in your own academic community, fostering both love and justice in your educational experience.

 3:00-4:30pm: Concurrent Session Block 2

  • Questioning the Myth of the Mold: Experiences of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Belonging at UR 
    • Facilitators: Adam Stanaland, Trang Nguyen, Erlinda Sali, Janelle S. Peifer, Jane Berry 
    • Description: Join us for an engaging session that unpacks the archetype of the 'ideal' University of Richmond community member. Through open dialogue, we’ll humanize and celebrate the diverse experiences of students who form the heart of our institution. This session pairs student voices with faculty insights, creating a rich, multifaceted conversation that bridges lived experiences and academic perspectives. Together, we’ll explore how to better center and uplift the authentic identities that shape our community. Don’t miss this opportunity to reflect, connect, and inspire change!
  • Remarrying Law and Justice
    • Facilitator: Johnthan Stubbs
    • Description: To build a community at the University of Richmond, which is more resilient as well as equitable, this workshop encourages participants to think more critically about applying a simple moral law to our behavior. The “law” is to treat others as you want to be treated. Many persons refer to this standard of human interaction as “The Golden Rule”. Stated differently, love your neighbor as yourself. We will explore the implications of applying the Golden Rule which has implications at many levels of human consciousness – from individual introspection to interpersonal relations, through group dynamics and conflict.

4:45-5:30pm: Concluding Dessert Reception

We hope participants will stick around for a reception with Valentine's day themed desserts and mocktails as we create an intentional space to reflect on what we learned and discussed during the summit sessions.

 

Past Equity Summits

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  • 2023 Sessions

    Black Joy: This session focused on developing anti-racist efforts that ensure happy, healthy lives for Black students and discussed strategies for imagining, planning, and implementing institutional and non-institutional changes.

    Equitable Education: This student-led session centered on student burnout resulting from individual student efforts toward equity and the desire to distribute change-making responsibility among all community members.

    Ethnic Studies: This session focused on the possibility of an Ethnic Studies department at UR, what it looks like in other universities, and its benefits for UR’s academic development and student belonging.  

    Gender and Intersectionality: This session focused on ways to support gender-expansive Spiders and Spiders of non-majority genders through an intersectional lens, accounting for race, age, ability, and other identities.

    Marginalization in the Classroom: This conversation focused on the academic experience of students from non-majority backgrounds in the classroom. 

  • 2020 Sessions

    Antisemitism: This session explored a careful, historical analysis of how members of the Jewish community have been systematically and purposefully oppressed. It also provided space for small group breakouts where students could share their experiences with antisemitism at UR and ended with a discussion focused on potential solutions. 

    Africana Studies: Students and faculty who had been previously advocating for an Africana Studies Program hosted a session at the Equity Summit. (The program later received approval to move forward.) 

    LGBTQIA+ Community Life at UR: This session provided space for members of the LGBTQIA community to share their experiences at UR, such as the coordinate college system, standing with Black Lives Matter, information about institutional initiatives in development, and desires to make the academic curriculum more reflective of LGBTQIA+ perspectives. Anonymous session notes were documented and shared with the campus community.

    Violence Prevention and Title IX: This session started with a socio-ecological model of violence prevention, the pyramid of rape culture, and sexual violence statistics, including data about disproprortianately affected communities. Following the presentation, participants broke out into six groups to identify sources of sexual violence and brainstorm measures that could be taken to reduce campus sexual violence at individual, relational, and community levels. 

    White Privilege as Visualized on UR’s Campus: This session explored definitions of white privilege, allowing all participants to discuss how they see it visualized and depicted at the University of Richmond. The session ended with conversations focused on potential solutions. 

    Xenophobia: This session focused on the discrimination and anxiety that UR students experienced as the COVID pandemic became racialized by US political leaders, the Eurocentric focus of UR’s curriculum, and challenging co-curricular experiences. Anonymous session notes were documented and shared with the campus community.