USC Race & Equity Center’s Equity Now! Series September 10, 17, 24, and October 1

The CSU Student Success Network is excited to partner with the USC Race & Equity Center for its workshop series Equity Now! – an equity-focused professional development series for CSU staff, faculty, and administrators.

Participation is free for all CSU faculty, staff, and administrators. 

Series Objectives

During the four-week span of the project, Equity Now practitioners will:

1) Engage in critical identity exploration, increase your understanding of key terminology, complicate your positionality, and identify the various levels racism operates on;

2) Gain facility using the following concepts as foundations for racial literacy: race, racism, power, privilege, equity-mindedness, and antiracism. Learn to identify and combat racial equity detours;

3) Learn how to more skillfully access, analyze, and share disaggregated data in your institution as an advocacy tool for racial equity; and,

4) Identify key action steps you can take for yourself and in your institution to effect meaningful and sustainable change. Understand how to effectively hold yourself and others accountable.

Workshop Topics

Unpacking Internal and Institutional Racism

This eConvening is an introduction to foundational concepts and terms pertaining to how race, privilege, and power continue to perpetuate inequitable outcomes within higher education. We will set ground rules and community standards that will lay the foundation for the rest of the eLearning series. Participants will engage in a social identity exploration and explore how their identities relate to their experiences with privilege or marginalization within college spaces.

Skill-Building for Racial Literacy

This eConvening focuses on what race-conscious practitioners do to advance racial equity, questions they ask, data sources on which they rely, and relationships they foster with racially diverse stakeholders on campus. Also discussed are the benefits of leading with a high level of consciousness and threats of attempting to lead without consciousness of racial realities at their institutions.

Leveraging Racial Equity Data

This eConvening will emphasize 1) how to understand data in equity-minded ways, 2) how to set numeric equity goals (which involves establishing specific, actionable equity goals and prioritizing these goals based on the equity gap size, the number of students impacted, and other pressures like institutional mission, system priorities, funders, state government, etc.) and 3) how to use this quantitative data to guide qualitative and mixed-methods inquiry into their day-to-day practice. Participants will also be guided to think critically about the way they’ve been socialized to talk about students, student outcomes, and their own agency in supporting student success and especially the success of students from minoritized racial/ethnic groups.

Taking Action for Racial Equity Now!

This eConvening will engage faculty and staff in action planning to identify barriers and opportunities to create and sustain equity-minded change for their campuses.

Space is limited. By registering for this series, participants agree to be available to attend all 4 session dates.