The Equity Summit started in the Spring of 2020 with a vision from active students who wanted to elevate important conversations focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging on UR’s campus. It quickly became a collaborative endeavor among numerous students, staff, and faculty who co-created two key summits, hosting dozens of workshops where participants from numerous parts of campus engaged with diverse perspectives and reflected on important DEIB topics.
As the current committee prepares for the next summit (EQ 25) on February 14, 2025, we are excited to announce that this year’s theme will be “Love and Justice: A Recipe for Social Change.” This theme highlights 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. While the proposal submission deadline has passed, stay tuned as we annouce workshop topics and facilitators.
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.
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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.