Equity in Action: 2025 Year in Review from the AVPEI

This year, we continued building an online hub that brings together practical EDI learning resources, and launched three educational booklets, including on human rights obligations, anti-Jewish discrimination, and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination. 

Through gatherings such as the EDI Action Network, Employment Equity Advisor Program Capacity-Building Retreats, Conflict Engagement skill-building sessions and the EDI Learning Series, we created more spaces where our students, faculty and staff can connect, share lived experiences and build their EDI practice.

In 2025, the StEAR Enhancement Fund made up to $300,000 available in grants of $500–$10,000 to support student-, faculty- and staff-led projects that advance UBC’s equity and anti-racism priorities. Two of three calls are complete and we are excited to announce the awardees in the new year.

We released the 2024 edition of the annual Employment Equity Report and conducted the 2025 employment equity census, with the cumulative response rate to the census now surpassing 90 per cent overall. We also supported the 2025 Student Diversity Census. These efforts enable data-informed conversations and efforts about representation, hiring, promotion and retention, and helps Faculties and portfolios prioritize concrete actions.

Releasing the Progress Report on the StEAR Framework marked two years since the launch of the StEAR Framework and Roadmap for Change in 2023. In a Q&A reflecting on this progress, I speak to what is working well, where indicators remain challenging to move, and how community feedback is shaping the next phase of our equity and anti-racism work.

We know that change happens in units, in departments, in classrooms and offices. This year, we expanded our catalogue of unit and departmental initiatives that advance UBC’s equity and anti-racism priorities. The catalogue offers a shared view of EDI work across our campuses, supporting peer learning among units and helping us tailor supports and track progress over time.

We released a report on UBC’s Accessibility Plan this year. An Action Plan is also being developed to identify what UBC is doing well and where there are opportunities to improve compliance with new standards and to progress institution accessibility aspirations aligned with the university’s equity and inclusive excellence goals. The EIO has hired a strategist and seconded a project manager to support and sustain accessibility planning, implementation and evaluation work.

Additionally, planning is underway for a campus consultation process to engage disabled students, faculty and staff to inform the Action Plan in early 2026.

This fall, we launched a Workplace Accessibility & Inclusion Action Research (AIAR) Toolkit pilot to support units in having more meaningful conversations about disability and accessibility in the workplace. It offers practical tools, such as a unit assessment survey and action-planning templates that I hope will help leaders and teams move from one-off accommodations toward more proactive, systemic approaches to inclusion in the workplace.

Our office has been working to strengthen the Black Excellence ecosystem at UBC – to bring more intentionality to efforts to support Black student, faculty, and staff inclusion and flourishing. One of the initiatives I have been especially heartened by is the launch of the Black Mental Wellness Collective. Founded and led by students, the collective creates space where Black students can show up as themselves, free of judgement, and build community rooted in care, connection and cultural understanding. With guidance from colleagues in the Equity & Inclusion Office, we were able to provide seed funding and space for the Collective’s welcome event, supporting a community that centres the mental, emotional and academic wellbeing of Black students.  

This past year we also implemented two very well-attended student, faculty and staff networking events – one on each campus. And the university progressed the Black faculty cohort hiring initiative bringing the total number of new scholars hired to thirteen out of a possible twenty-three planned over the life time of the initiative.

Guided by our commitments to the 2020 Scarborough Charter, and building on the work outlined in the Black excellence report, we will deepen our efforts to advance Black excellence across UBC. This includes strengthening pathways for Black students and scholars, addressing structural barriers in recruitment and retention, and supporting relevant programs, research and community spaces in sustained and coordinated ways.

We will build on our employment equity and student diversity data to better understand who is represented across our campuses and where inequities persist. This work will help us refine our goals, monitor change over time, and support Faculties and portfolios to align hiring, retention and student success efforts with UBC’s equity commitments.

In consultation with the Accessibility Committee, we will move forward with a campus consultation process to engage disabled students, faculty and staff in building on what we have already heard about accessibility barriers and in co-shaping priorities for how we move forward.

We will continue to implement the StEAR Roadmap and evaluate our progress on UBC’s strategic equity and anti-racism commitments, using the StEAR Framework to identify where momentum is building and where we need to adjust course. Our focus will remain on sharing meaningful progress updates, and on using what we learn to guide concrete institutional decisions.

We will continue to grow our suite of educational resources on foundational EDI and conflict engagement, while also launching updates to the Hiring Equity course. Together, these offerings are designed to meet people where they are—whether they are search committee members, hiring managers, HR partners or leaders and teams seeking to strengthen their EDI practice—and to make it easier to embed equity into recruitment, navigate difficult conversations, and move beyond compliance toward practices that actively counter bias and open up pathways for equity-deserving candidates.