Awards Encourage Activities to Support Diversity

Bleuzette Marshall, Interim Chief Diversity Officer, has announced that seven diversity incentive awards have been granted for 2013. The award recipients were selected by a committee of the President's Diversity Council.

"Proposals submitted covered a wide range of ideas which made a challenging review process for the selection team," Marshall said.

Recipients of the 2013 awards, and the matching funds provided by the initiating department are:

College of Allied Health Sciences
MC2 Mentoring Program 
$7000 award; $7000 matching
This project is designed to encourage retention, graduation, leadership, educational, and research for students from diverse backgrounds and first generation college students preparing for graduate education.  A student organization based in the college, “Multicultural Concerns in Communication Sciences and Disorders” (MC2 ), will support faculty to student mentoring, alumni to student mentoring, research mentoring, and peer mentoring.  The objectives are to pair underrepresented students with professionals, faculty, researchers, and peer mentors; encourage student involvement in professional/leadership activities; facilitate involvement in research/scholarly activities; support students in developing their own mentoring skills through serving as a peer mentor; retain students through graduation and guide them into graduate school. 

College of Allied Health Sciences
Diversity Enhancement Program 
$9000 award; $9000 matching
The goal of the CAHS Diversity Enhancement program is to increase the enrollment, retention and graduation of African American students. It builds on and expands last year's successful program by increasing the number of program participants and adding formal orientation for mentors and mentees; more structured social opportunities to strengthen the relationship between mentors and mentees; and increased feedback to enable positive changes in the program.

UC International
Educational Videos 
$4500 award; $4500 matching
This project will develop a bank of 20-30 video "shorts" using UC's own diverse students to relate the value of experiencing a different culture abroad, or in coming from abroad to study at UC. Target populations are: domestic students (especially underrepresented) considering studying abroad and international students contemplating enrolling in an American university. Collectively, these
videos can help UC provide more domestic students with very diverse cultural experiences, as well as helping to further diversify the student population by reassuring international students about their ability to cope with and succeed in a foreign environment.

College of Nursing
Implementing Diversity Education Plan 
$9000 award; $16,025 matching
The College of Nursing will achieve its vision of transforming healthcare by implementing a plan to enhance the recruitment, selection, retention, and graduation of a diverse student, staff and faculty population and create a culture of inclusion. To accomplish the espoused goals, the college will re-establish the Diversity Advisory Council to support the college leadership to create a culture that facilitates success of diverse faculty, staff and students as we educate future nurses. A culture transformation consultant will provide the support required to complete the implementation plan, including conduction of a culture assessment.

Lindner College of Business
Business Fellows First-Year Leadership Program  
$7000 award; $25,520 matching
At the Lindner College of Business, the Business Fellows program seeks to be a valued leader in recruiting, developing and graduating outstanding business professionals of color. This proposal seeks support to fuel this effort by helping launch the Business Fellows First Year Leadership Program (BF-FYLP); an initiative designed to attract and develop future leaders of Business Fellows, the college and their professions. A well-designed series of Saturday seminars, capped by an international experience, BF-FYLP will provide exceptional leadership development, while building a strong foundation for the students’ academic, professional and personal success.

Division of Student Affairs
McNair/STARS Program  
$6500 award; (grant funded program)
The STARS Scholars Program at the University of Cincinnati provides research and scholarly activities that include undergraduate research experiences, faculty mentoring and shadowing, graduate school application preparation and participation in professional conferences. This program continues to support the improvement of retention and graduation rates of underrepresented ethnic groups and ultimately prepares students for graduate school reducing barriers to achieving these goals. Currently, this population is underserved by formal and informal undergraduate research projects. An investment with the STARS Scholars program will provide highly motivated and academically strong underrepresented students with an experience that will change their future aspirations towards graduate education and the professoriate.

Division of Student Affairs
Nonviolence Training  
$2000 award; $1000 matching
Through an investment, Student Activities and Leadership Development will expand its leadership education and development programming to include the international best practice curricula of Kingian Nonviolence.  This will result in increased capacity of the UC community to effectively engage diversity and apply nonviolent methodology to personal, interpersonal, group, and institutional issues.  This transformational development programming will be implemented by a trained Level I Kingian Nonviolence Trainer through regularly scheduled and by-request nonviolence trainings.  Its impact will be measured through mixed methodology assessment.

“Congratulations to all recipients,” Marshall said. “Their efforts are working to build a more diverse and inclusive campus environment.”