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Goals & Actions

In this second phase, we will pursue a series of action items and concrete tactics that build on the foundation laid over the first two years. Situated across five overarching goals, these actions seek to accelerate our progress by building accountabilities for systemic change, with a focus on advancing racial equity.

Goal 1: Learning, Curriculum, and Professional Development

Vision: AU faculty, staff, students, alumni leadership, administrators, and Board of Trustees will demonstrate cultural competence and racial literacy by building critical knowledge and skills to use inclusive and antiracist practices.

• Action Step 1: Build university leadership and senior administrators’ knowledge and skills to exercise intercultural competence to lead for equity.
• Action Step 2: Support all faculty in using inclusive and antiracist teaching strategies to enhance classroom climate. 
• Action Step 3: Build staff and faculty administrators’ knowledge and skills to use inclusive practices in their daily work.
• Action Step 4: Increase AU students’ knowledge and awareness of impacts of systems of power, privilege, and inequality, as well as BIPOC history, excellence, joy and resistance. Build students’ capacity to critically engage and learn from diverse perspectives, and skills to use inclusive practices to lead change at AU and beyond.
• Action Step 5: Engage alumni leaders in campuswide efforts to build knowledge and skills to foster diversity, equity and inclusion.

Goal 2: Campus Culture, Climate and Community

Vison: We will develop an inclusive campus climate and culture where all students, alumni, faculty, and staff feel welcome and have a sense of belonging and community while their overall well-being is supported through respectful, meaningful, and engaged relationships with each other.

• Action Step 1: Increase student sense of belonging at AU, especially among students who feel least included at AU, with an emphasis on Black students whose sense of belonging is the lowest among all groups.
• Action Step 2: Increase staff sense of belonging and thriving, especially for younger staff and staff in the lower pay bands at AU.
• Action Step 3: Increase faculty sense of belonging and thriving, especially for Latinx, Black and term faculty who feel least included at AU.  
• Action Step 4: Enhance culture of collaboration and innovation around DEI work among faculty, staff, students and alumni across roles, departments, and student organizations.
• Action Step 5: Invest in broadening connections and sense of belonging among multicultural alumni and other affinity groups and networks including the Pride, Latino, Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander, AU Veterans and AU Women’s Network.

Goal 3: Policies, Procedures, and Practices

Vison: AU’s policies, procedures, and practices will promote diversity, inclusion, transparency and accountability.

• Action Step 1: Ensure existing and new university policies and procedures advance equity and accountability.
• Action Step 2: Enhance governance, monitoring, and accountability efforts to ensure progress on IE plan goals.
• Action Step 3: Increase accessibility on campus.
• Action Step 4: Ensure all policies and programs intentionally advance student success and thriving, with a particular emphasis on racial equity.
• Action Step 5: Ensure all leaders and managers are accountable for using inclusive practices for equity.

Goal 4: Access and Equity

Vison: We will recruit, retain, and recognize a diverse body of AU students, faculty, staff, and administrators by increasing access and advancing inclusion for equitable outcomes, with a specific focus on racial equity. 

• Action Step 1: Continue to focus on affordability and access to AU for students who have been historically underrepresented.
• Action Step 2: Solidify and sustain our commitment to DC by advancing educational access and equity for local students and families.
• Action Step 3: Enhance student success by addressing physical and emotional well-being of students through enhanced culturally responsive education and prevention interventions, with particular emphasis on mental health and health promotion. 
• Action Step 4: Continue efforts to diversify faculty hiring and retention, especially for those from historically underrepresented groups, to advance excellence in intellectual engagement, scholarship, and research.
• Action Step 5: Enhance equity and career paths for AU staff.
• Action Step 6: Enhance diversity among university leadership (senior administrators and Board of Trustees).

Goal 5: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work

Vison: We will foster, support, and promote scholarship, research and creative works that attends to diversity, equity, and inclusion, whether in intellectual content, theoretical frameworks, processes and methodology, analyses of data, participation of research subjects, or engagement with the wider public. 

• Action Step 1: Incentivize faculty engagement in DEI in research methods, process, dissemination, and/or content.
• Action Step 2: Recognize faculty engagement in DEI in research methods, process, dissemination and/or content.
• Action Step 3: Continue to develop and support the work of research entities that are dedicated to addressing social equity