Building an Inclusive UBC Sauder Community

1.  An inclusive and respectful community
A UBC Sauder community with EDI knowledge, skills, and practices and the organizational capacity to enhance a culture of inclusion, belonging, and collaboration.

A.  Community that Embraces EDI

• Sponsor the development of EDI competencies through training and learning.
• Promote commitment and capacity through increased collaboration between and among leadership, unit heads, and various stakeholder groups (faculty, staff, students, and alumni).
• Work with the Senior Associate Dean Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, to review and enhance policies, practices, and actions that support EDI.

B. Inclusive Teaching and Learning

• Support inclusive course design, teaching practices, and assessments.
• Promote respectful and inclusive learning
• Welcome and encourage student feedback and perspectives on their learning experiences.
• Integrate a diverse range of perspectives, including Indigenous identities, cultures, values, and ways of knowing, in our approach to teaching and learning.

C. Inclusive Research

• Provide support for EDI-themed research.
• Ensure equitable and inclusive practices in award nominations and in the allocation of research grants.

2.   Diverse and vibrant faculty, staff and students

      Recruiting and retention practices that eliminate biases and barriers, and increase representation of under-represented and marginalized groups in order to create an organization that embodies diverse perspectives, as well as enhances feelings of belonging, safety, and accessibility.

A. Accessibility

•  Ensure accessibility for faculty, staff, students, alumni, and visitors with disabilities.

B. Equitable Recruitment

• Develop recruitment practices and metrics to ensure inclusion of under-represented and persistently marginalized groups
• Enhance active recruitment for EDI competencies and capacity to excel and contribute in a diverse work environment.

C. Equitable Retention and Career Advancement

•  Implement retention practices that support equity, diversity, and inclusion.
• Recognize service contributions to EDI in performance reviews.

3.   Accountability, Engagement and Communication

      Timely reporting processes, community engagement, and transparent communication to the broader UBC Sauder community.

A. Accountability

• Establish channels for all UBC Sauder units to report their EDI initiatives, activities, and metrics as part of annual strategic planning.
• Report annually to the Dean on progress of EDI Principles and Goals including actions undertaken across the school.

B. External Dialogue and Engagement

• Embed EDI criteria in partnerships with employers, external contractors, Indigenous communities of interest, alumni, and other external stakeholders toward supporting an inclusive environment at Sauder.

C. EDI-related Communication

• Develop a communications strategy to report to our community on EDI initiatives and impacts that include an EDI Webpage and the EDI Committee Annual Report.

Equity: Recognizing that everyone is not starting from the same place or history, deliberate measures to remove barriers to opportunities may need to be taken to ensure fair processes and outcomes.

Equity refers to achieving parity in policy, process and outcomes for historically and/or currently underrepresented and/or marginalized people and groups while accounting for diversity.

It considers power, access, opportunities, treatment, impacts, and outcomes, in three main areas:

• Representational equity: the proportional participation at all levels of an institution;
• Resource equity: the distribution of resources in order to close equity gaps; and
• Equity-mindedness: the demonstration of an awareness of, and willingness to, address equity issues.

Diversity: Differences in the lived experiences and perspectives of people that may include race, ethnicity, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, marital status, family status, physical disability, mental disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, class, and/or socioeconomic situations.

Inclusion: Inclusion is an active, intentional, and continuous process to bring marginalized individuals and/or groups into processes, activities, and decision-making to address inequities in power and privilege, and build a respectful and diverse community that ensures welcoming spaces and opportunities to flourish for all.

Historically, persistently, or systemically marginalized: This language was intentionally and carefully chosen to recognize that:

• UBC and other institutions throughout Canada were created at a time when societal norms privileged and included some groups and disadvantaged and excluded others. In Canada, these disadvantaged groups have been defined as Indigenous people, women, people with disabilities, racialized people, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people.
• This history entrains a legacy of day-to- day barriers that contributed to past, and perpetuate current, inequities which compound over time;
• Our systems, in the form of policies, practices, culture, behaviours, and beliefs continue to maintain these barriers in the ways that they continue to create the institution. It is often not an individual intentional, systematic, effort to discriminate. It is an unconscious, unrecognized practice of doing things as they have always been done (and recreating the historical exclusions).

IBPOC is a contemporary term that refers to Indigenous, Black and People Of Colour. Its origins are from the USA where the term is often expressed as BIPOC. At UBC and in other Canadian contexts, IBPOC is often used to place 'First Peoples first.'

Disability and Access: Persons who have a significant and persistent mobility, sensory, learning, or other physical or mental health impairment; experience functional restrictions or limitations of their ability to perform the range of life’s activities; and may experience attitudinal and/or environmental barriers that hamper their full and self‐directed participation in University activities (UBC Policy 73).

Intersectionality: The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity as they apply to a given individual or group. The term was coined by lawyer, civil rights advocate, and critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the “various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural and political aspects of violence against women of color”. Intersectional identities create overlapping and interdependent systems of marginalization, discrimination or disadvantage.