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2020-2021 EDI Grant Recipients

Project Title Establishing a Community of Care: Integration of Team Members, Setting, & Process
Project Manager (Person submitting the proposal). Michel Pierick, Dual Enrollment & Education Innovation Manager
 
Over the 2020-21 academic year, Enrollment Management (EM) has strategically committed to establishing its common purpose as Transformational Support for Student Success through the work of Disney’s Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service. To fulfill EM’s common purpose, all departments and staff (Financial Aid, Extension, Registrar, Students First Center, EM Systems, and Admissions) have defined quality standards in ranking order of care, guidance, access, and efficiency. As not only a part of defining each quality standard, EM has also integrated each quality standard with a emphasis on team members, setting, and process. As a part of measuring the integration of EM Quality Standards, staff were surveyed before and after to capture the effectiveness of integration and shift in each quality standard related to team members, setting, and process. The duration of this process has concluded in a little over a year.

This proposal will focus on the results from the quality standard of Care with an emphasis on team members, setting, and process. EM defines the quality standard of Care as “We have a responsibility to create an environment where our diverse community feels comfortable to ask questions, team members listen to understand, and we communicate with respect and honesty valuing each person’s cultural and identity differences.” In consultation with community leader and trainer, Delray C. Shelton, EM will undergo additional surveying to further analyze macro-level results of integration survey which will inform (a) foundational level training in race, anti-racism, implicit bias, and cultural diversity and (b) the strategical development of advanced training designed to directly shift the quality standard of Care and integration of team members, setting, and process with techniques focused in Enrollment Management services.

 
Project Title First, Do No Harm: Narrative Medicine and Radical Listening Against Anti-Blackness, Anti-Black Violence , Racism and Oppression
Project Manager: Nigel Hatton, Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and Dalena Ngo, Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Group
Medicine.
We propose to hold a set of Narrative Medicine workshops that focus “on anti-blackness, anti-black violence, professional development to promote black excellence and radical healing on historical trauma and/or coping with racism/oppression.” The Narrative Medicine movement began in hospitals around the year 2000 in order to improve communication and relationships between doctors and patients. It has grown into “a rigorous intellectual and clinical discipline to fortify healthcare with the capacity to skillfully receive the accounts persons give of themselves—to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved to action by the stories of others” (The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine 2017). In a Narrative Medicine encounter, patients and doctors (and other hospital professionals) read an excerpt of a work of literature, hear a selection of music, or view an object from the visual arts, and follow the reading/listening/viewing with a reflection on the experience. The selected written, musical or visual text is usually related to medicine (take for example, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals) or a painting depicting a clinical setting. For this proposal, we adapt and apply Narrative Medicine for spaces in need of deep deliberation and reflection on “on anti-blackness, anti-black violence, professional development to promote black excellence and radical healing on historical trauma and/or coping with racism/oppression (we have selected proposed texts with this goal in mind).” After two decades of intense activity in the formation of Narrative Medicine as a movement, discipline and field, leading hospitals and medical schools practice and teach Narrative Medicine, and activists make use of the approach in their respective communities
 
 
 
Proposal – Central Valley Portraits
Prof. Yehuda Sharim
 

Project Description:

The times in which we live are times of dismay, anxiety, devastation, countless tragedies, hopelessness, and anger. All around us, beyond and within the U.S., democratic apparatuses are struggling to imagine freedom, throwing up nationalists, bigots, and fascists. How can we survive such mounting waves of suffering and loss? Where do we store and archive our wounds, anxieties, and uncaged dreams? And where can we locate the living archives for renewal and new times?

Central Valley Portraits is a photographic exhibition by photographer, filmmaker, and poet Yehuda Sharim. It is comprised of a series of photographs paired with poetic ruminations that reflect on facets of everyday life in the open fields and industrial complexes of Merced, California.

 

Yehuda Sharim explores the exteriors of environment and community — scanning the skies for flocks of birds traveling in mass during sunset and encountering strangers who become neighbors. He charts a region, in the midst of a global pandemic, often overlooked as “the other California”; gaps and cracks widening due to loss, everyday precarity, and continued neglect towards its most vulnerable. While listening to his surroundings through photographed images, Sharim navigates personal interior spaces in response to them as well, articulating fragmented thoughts that touch on individual memory, shared grief, and collective hope.