Effective March 15, 2021 Dean Shaya Gregory Poku moved into Wheaton’s inaugural position of Associate Vice President for Institutional Equity and Belonging. This senior-level role is a fulfillment of one of Wheaton’s 10 Action Steps towards Racial Justice to create a senior-level position focused on inclusion and equity.
Read the announcement from President Emeritus Hanno
Shaya’s letter to the Wheaton community
Mission of the Office
The Office for Institutional Equity and Belonging (OIEB) is an integral part of Wheaton’s pursuit of excellence. Enabling the college to fulfill its mission to provide a transformative liberal arts education, OIEB and its campus partners strengthen Wheaton’s capacity to envision and achieve a radically imaginative understanding of engagement, affirmation, and belonging in our community.
The Office’s role is two-fold: to foster decolonized learning and to advance cross-campus initiatives to produce bold, equity-driven outcomes. It does so by generating and disseminating evidence-based tools, initiatives, and frameworks. Above all, OIEB engages campus constituents and governance committees to anchor social justice, champion diversity, and weave equity and universal design into the operating norms of our college—our organizational practices, policies, and culture.
“Equity, diversity, and inclusion cannot be achieved just by taking a workshop, creating a list of action items, and attending a course—although all of these are important. What is essential is making a lifelong commitment, as an individual and an institution, to learning about structural inequities in the past and the present, to listening with empathy, and then to mending, to repairing the world, tikkun olam in Hebrew.”
~ President Michaele Whelan
Invitation for community input
We encourage you to share your hopes and aspirations for the Office for Institutional Equity and Belonging team. If you have any immediate suggestions or thoughts you’d like to share, please email equityandbelonging@wheatoncollege.edu.
Wheaton’s Equity Model
One of the first things that the Office for Institutional Equity and Belonging did was to outline this iterative model that shows the college’s path to achieving its DEIB goals.
- Institutional Investment and Commitment
- Shared Vision, Tools, and Goals
- Collecting and Learning from the Data
- Attention to Barriers and Disparities
- Personal and Departmental Accountability
- Revisiting System, Policies, and Processes
- Continual Capacity Building
- Celebrating Clear Points of Progress
DEAL
Our Diversity, Equity and Access Leadership (DEAL) group strives to create opportunities for innovative diversity work to ensure that Wheaton consistently provides a diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible learning community.
Vision & Mission
The DEI Vision and Mission Statement provides a framework and an anchor for our campus to guide our work as we continually outline new action steps and refresh our Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan going forward.
Equity Ecosystem
Driving our commitment to equity and belonging is an ecosystem of professionally staffed initiatives and offices that work in tandem to maximize our ability to create an inclusive living, learning, and working environment for students.
Institutional collaborations
DEAL
Our Diversity, Equity and Access Leadership (DEAL) group strives to create opportunities for innovative diversity work to ensure that Wheaton consistently provides a diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible learning community.
LGBTQ+ Network
Our Network for LGBTQ+ Inclusion, Support, and Advocacy is a group of dedicated faculty and staff members working to enhance the social, emotional, and academic lives of LGBTQ+ students.
First-Generation and Low-Income Task Force
Our First-Gen and Low-Income Task Force is working to establish Wheaton as a premier destination for talented first-generation and low-income students (FGLI) to excel.