Past Recipients

Recipients: UBC Arts & Culture District, Office of the Dean of Arts

Amount Funded: $2,900

Description: UBC ARTIVISM A Festival of Creative Resistance is a student initiated and run art festival. The festival is dedicated to giving safe spaces & platforms for self-expression to benefit the widest possible spectrum of UBC community from marginalized groups and gender identities - including faculty, staff, students, alumni and local artists. It highlights how they use their creative practice to express and advocate for themselves and social justice. ARTIVISM 2022 will be a hybrid online and in-person arts festival running September 21 - October 21 in concurrence with Culture Days, Canada’s largest public participation campaign for the arts, attendance is free or low-cost to keep barriers low.

Recipients: Office of the Vice-President, Students

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: The Inclusive Publishing project aims to provide equal access to all BC Studies content regardless of ability. Specifically, its goal is to make the journal website and published PDF articles more accessible and inclusive of all readers, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive, or motor impairments. The project aligns with UBC’s goal to enhance the accessibility of virtual spaces on UBC campuses for students, staff, and faculty. Its goal is to remove all barriers that can hinder one’s ability to access, navigate, or understand content BC Studies has published in the journal and online.

Recipients: Department of Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: This event aims to bring together UBC faculty, graduate students, and staff engaged in disability research, disability education, and disability justice initiatives across faculties, units, and disciplines at the Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. The event will provide a space to showcase their work and create an opportunity for networking and community-building as the first step towards the creation of a Centre for Disability Studies at UBC. The event will include: one keynote address by a speaker from outside UBC with experience in creating or leading a research centre focusing on disability studies and one panel discussion featuring three speakers from UBC.

Recipients: Health Equity, Promotion and Education in Student Health and Wellbeing

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: The Equity & Inclusion Office, in collaboration with the Sustainability Hub and Student Health and Wellbeing, is working to develop and host a new IBPOC student initiative similar to the IBPOC Connections for faculty and staff. Guided by the student recommendations from the UBC Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Final Report, this initiative aims to create a safe space where IBPOC students can connect and receive support in wellbeing and climate justice. This initiative seeks to secure funding to support “coffee connections” for different IBPOC affinity groups to enhance social connection on the issues of wellbeing and climate change. Part of this funding would also involve inviting IBPOC guest speakers and professionals from the community to speak on topics of health and wellbeing, sustainability and climate anxiety, and navigating spaces that have traditionally been created for and by white people.

Recipients: Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: This project aims to increase the success of equity-deserving groups applicants to UBC’s Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Dentistry, and Pharmaceutical Science programs. Twenty-five high-school and undergraduate students will participate in a paid intensive summer program at UBC-Vancouver and a nine-month mentorship program. The timing and modes of delivery will account for participants’ employment and accessibility needs.

Recipients: Office of the Vice-President, Students

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: The Office of the Vice-President, Students is comprised of student housing and community services, health and wellbeing, student affairs and athletics and recreation. Over 2,300 staff members and approximately 1,000 student staff will be directly involved over the next 5 years in designing and implementing student outcomes that have been articulated in the recently launched UBC Student Strategic Plan that aligns with the university’s commitments to EDI, anti-racism and Indigenization. Taking a phased approach, this new project is focused on the first phase of multiple steps that the VPS portfolio intends to engage in at the Vancouver campus.

Recipients: Athletics & Recreation

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: The Department of Athletics and Recreation recognizes the need to push forward a variety of initiatives relating to equity, diversity, and inclusion within its programming and processes. These initiatives have been identified through surveys, partnerships, and programs. Some of the foundational work has been completed; however, there is still much to be done to drive these initiatives forward and to full fruition. To accelerate the execution and continued impact of these initiatives, the department would like to create a new student staff position, engaging in a new skill set to add experience and focus to these projects.

Recipients: Department of Psychology

Amount Funded: $5,000

Description: The Diversity Mentorship Program in Psychology prepares students from diverse, under-resourced, underrepresented, and/or marginalized backgrounds for graduate school in psychology. Each mentee will be paired with a mentor – either a UBC Psych graduate student or postdoctoral fellow.

Recipients: Student Experience Office

Amount Funded: $1,750

Description: The Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) Orientations is an initiative to create spaces to uplift historically marginalized groups. After thoroughly studying UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan (ISP), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and participating in the ISP Intent to Action Workshops hosted by the Indigenous Programs and Services at UBC, this initiative seeks to provide educative and knowledgeable information about Indigenous communities in Canada, to new-to-Canada international students.

Recipients: Campus Wellness and Education Unit 

Amount Funded: $1,560 

Description:This new project is a collaboration between Indigenous Programs and Services (IPS), UBCO’s chapter of Canadian American Indian Science and Engineering Society (CAISES), and Campus Wellness and Education’s Canadian American Indian Science and Engineering Society (HaRT). In 2016, BC’s Medical Health Officer declared the toxic drug supply (TDS) an epidemic due to the staggering number of deaths it caused. The TDS has evolved and worsened with inequitable impacts on Indigenous communities. Concerningly, stigma is a major contributor; students who use drugs experience elevated levels of discrimination, which are worse and more nuanced for Indigenous students. This stigma alongside systemic racism can prevent people from accessing life-saving resources. Therefore, this project aims to address these concerns by aligning with Equity & Inclusion Office mandates, principles of Inclusive Excellence, and UBC’s Respectful Environment Statement (e.g., promoting events that have diverse social activities other than consuming substances).

Recipients: UBC Okanagan Library

Amount Funded: $500

Description: The goal of this project is to support a new Indigenous reads book club on the Okanagan campus. This is a collaborative effort with UBC Okanagan Library, Indigenous Programs and Services, and the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal. This book club will be an opportunity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty and staff to meet and discuss a book by an Indigenous author. This will provide a space for open and honest discussion.

Recipients: College of Graduate Studies

Amount Funded: $1,300

Description: In 2021W2, the College of Graduate Studies started an EDI Book Club as a pilot project to foster EDI discussions on racism, discrimination & historical violence against IBPOC & 2SLGBTQIA+ community members. This initiative seeks to extend the pilot project for a 1-year period. Following the pilot, they hope to receive ongoing funding as part of the CoGS’ budget.

For the book club, a compiled list of recommended readings from IBPOC & 2SLGBTQIA+ writers will be built continuously.

Recipients: Athletics & Recreation

Amount Funded: $1,500

Description: Last season, driven by two members of Athletic & Recreation’s women's volleyball team, the UBCO Heat hosted their first Pride Night when their volleyball teams hosted the TRU Wolfpack in January 2022. For the event, they worked with the Equity & Inclusion Office on the Okanagan campus to plan the evening, while connecting with Etcetera, a 2SLGBTQIA+ youth organization through the Bridge Youth & Family Services in Kelowna, to be involved in the night.

This season they would like to expand on this event by making the night even bigger, in the hopes of increasing their fundraising efforts for Etcetera. Their Heat Athletic Council (HAC), which is a student-athlete led group that drives community engagement for their department, has made supporting Etcetera their primary goal over the next 5 years. Their hope with this funding will be to increase the Pride-themed elements of the evening and provide them the budgetary flexibility to implement any new ideas that HAC may have.

Recipients: UBC Arts & Culture District, Office of the Dean of Arts

Description:ARTIVISM, is an annual UBC student initiated and run art festival which was founded in 2018 as ‘A Festival of Creative Resistance.’ In 2020, ARTIVISM pivoted from a 10-day bricks and mortar event to a two-month online festival. Now in its fourth year, ARTIVISM gives youth the opportunity to create, exhibit, perform and share their artistic activism.

The festival is dedicated to giving safe spaces and platforms for self-expression and to benefit the widest possible spectrum of UBC community from marginalised communities and gender identities. ARTIVISM programs and/or enables provocative student performances, political speakers, films and more through showcases, maker shops, art exhibitions, comedy nights, tours, panels, workshops and art sales - all focused on diverse activist art practices and dialogue.

ARTIVISM provides spaces that highlight creative minority voices in our UBC community, including faculty, staff, students, alumni as well as other local artists and groups. It highlights how they use their art and creative practice to express and advocate for themselves and their experiences in the digital era.

ARTIVISM 2021 will take an intersectional approach on topics such as: Experiencing the LGBTQIA+ Community as BIPOC, Decolonizing The Arts, Drag & Identity, Online Dating and Race, How Microaggressions Perpetuate White Supremacy, Experiences with Identity Within Marginalized Groups, Race in the Digital World.

Recipients: Enrolment Services

Description: This project is intended to support equity in UBC’s adjudication processes so that UBC professionals who are undertaking admissions and awards assessment responsibilities are consistently aligning their practices with the inclusion goals of UBC’s Strategic Plan and Inclusion Action Plan, and UBC’s commitments to reconciliation and the goals of the Indigenous Strategic Plan. The funding will be used to develop new/additional research-based content; work with UBC Studios to use media to improve the existing training modules so the content is less text-heavy and more learner-centric; produce training modules that can be used by any UBC staff/faculty members who are responsible for admissions/awards selection . These training modules would be foundational modules to ensure consistent inclusivity practices in UBC selection processes for student admissions and awards.

Recipients: Health Promotion & Education

Description: The Wellness Centre IBPOC (WC-IBPOC) program is a pilot program whose activities will launch in September 2021. The program is being developed to support the specific wellbeing needs of IBPOC students at UBC-V and to facilitate opportunities for students to feel empowered in navigating and advocating for their own health and wellbeing within the communities in which they live and learn. Central to implementing the WC-IBPOC program activities and services will be the IBPOC Wellness Mentors- trained student staff who will hold one-on-one and group mentorship conversations. The Mentors will also host monthly events that highlight a wellbeing topic or activity.

Recipients: Centre for Teaching Learning, and Technology (CTLT), Indigenous Initiatives

Description: This project aims to build graduate student and TA capacity to peer-facilitate Classroom Climate and EDI TA Training workshops. As Crey and Perrault explain in a 2009 environmental scan of TA Training programs*, while TAs value learning from instructors and more experienced facilitators, they also find it valuable to learn from their peers who are having the same experiences. When TAs are supported by peers, their learning is more authentic, and they are able to share about the vulnerabilities when their supervisors are not there. A peer-based learning model also offers the opportunity for senior TAs to become facilitators and deepen their engagement with classroom climate through modeling and application.

Recipients: The UBC Chapter of AISES -The American Indian Science and Engineering Society

Description: The purpose of our application for funding is to support emergent projects primarily focusing on connecting with Indigenous youth who may be considering STEM fields or have an interest and also the student populations who are currently entering STEM degrees at UBC. The project areas include:
1. Indigenous Youth Mentorship for High School Students
2. Mentorship programming for Incoming Indigenous STEM students
3. Indigenous Youth STEM Outreach workshops
4. Career themed workshops for all students to help solidify career connections specifically for Indigenous students in STEM careers.
5. Networking with Indigenous STEM Students and Professionals across Canada and Internationally.

Recipients: BIPOC Student Collective/Midwifery/Dept. Family Practice/Faculty of Medicine

Description: This project is the first of its kind aimed at strengthening and supporting racialized midwifery students to enhance BIPOC learner experiences and retention—a necessary step towards dismantling anti-Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (BIPOC) racism within Canadian healthcare and educational systems. The BIPOC student-led survey developed Summer 2021 will provide baseline data for the work of the BIPOC Student Collective, while setting the framework for an evaluation of its impact. Data about the lived-experiences of racialized students generated from the survey will inform BSC actions aimed at strengthening and supporting racialized midwifery students, enhancing learner experiences and retention. Furthermore, testing content, feasibility and applicability of the survey instrument will establish a validated tool to measure: (a) ongoing responsiveness and accountability; and, (b) program improvements guided towards racial equity, healing and anti-racist action. Both the survey instruments and results will offer systems change guidance to other midwifery and health professional education programs with similar agendas to dismantle anti-BIPOC racism.

Recipients: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences/CCGS

Description: Five women faculty and two student project coordinators will combine efforts in a year-long co-making and co-designing project to address and accelerate culturally-based, anti-racist, innovative mentoring and leadership training of Indigenous, Black, and Racialized (IBRac) women faculty at UBC Okanagan. This improved practice, in turn, promotes a respectful environment and builds faculty competencies towards a sustainable model for IBRac student mentorship and success. In this two-phase project, we make space for IBRac women faculty mentorship and leadership support, developed by, alongside and for IBRac women faculty at UBCO. Through Phase 1 activities, IBRac women faculty will co-design and co-share a conversational, collaborative virtual space that facilitates a culturally and creatively relevant community towards unpacking systemic barriers in the workplace and develops healthy and sustainable approaches to mentorship and leadership through decolonial, anti-racism, inter-generational and gender lenses. In Phase 2, we will expand our model of community mentorship for IBRac students, their experience, learning, and success.

Recipients: FCCS

Description: BRILLIANCE is a soft-cover art book celebrating UBC-O’s Black, Indigenous and artists of colour (BIPOC artists), including current and past students and faculty. This full-colour publication will feature approximately twenty artists and will culminate in a book launch/panel discussion.

Beyond the resulting artifact, the publication process provides opportunities for connections and mentorship among BIPOC alumni and the wider arts community; increases awareness of BIPOC artists’ work, presence and contributions on campus; and fosters relationships necessary to create an inclusive environment on campus, which is vital to the academic success of BIPOC student artists.

Recipients: FCCS

Description: BRILLIANCE is a soft-cover art book celebrating UBC-O’s Black, Indigenous and artists of colour (BIPOC artists), including current and past students and faculty. This full-colour publication will feature approximately twenty artists and will culminate in a book launch/panel discussion.

Beyond the resulting artifact, the publication process provides opportunities for connections and mentorship among BIPOC alumni and the wider arts community; increases awareness of BIPOC artists’ work, presence and contributions on campus; and fosters relationships necessary to create an inclusive environment on campus, which is vital to the academic success of BIPOC student artists.

Recipients: Faculty of Science

Description: Recognizing a lack of diversity within the STEM field, a new week-long conference this fall promoting equity and diversity within STEM will be held. The conference will consist of a few virtual events, including speaking engagements for scientists from underrepresented communities to showcase their work and inspire young scientists. An equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) workshop will be offered, to help educate the science community on best practices for promoting and supporting diversity in STEM. This event will be primarily geared toward undergraduate students, but will also be open to high school students and the broader community as well. 

Recipients: FCCS-Creative Studies

Description: This project proposes to create and disseminate a new suite of discussion-starter, bite-size, highly sharable and captivating interactive, motion and static graphics, short animations and infographics that gather and share critical thinking about systemic racism and Islamophobia. The art and visual cultural history of the Islamic world will inform the visual language developed. The suite will be open-source, CC licensed and hosted on Github (website & repository), archive.org and UBC CANVAS. It is envisioned that it will be used by the UBC community in classrooms, Antiracism and EDI workshops for staff, in UBC communications platforms and beyond such as school curricula as they can be easily incorporated into presentations, websites, social media posts, videos, digital signage and print material, for occasions like Canadian Islamic History Month in October.

Recipients: Creative Studies

Description: Soundtrack is a weekly live broadcast (on YouTube) queer oral history project, with an accompanying creative writing component for viewers to participate in afterwards, both of which use albums as a touchstone for time and place. Each episode will be broadcast live, and under 15 minutes, then archived for future viewings. The broadcasts are designed to be economical, to make for an easy teaching tool (suitable for creative writing, gender/women's studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, maybe even music, as examples).

Recipients: UBC Physics & Astronomy

Description: This project is a recruitment pilot event with a two-fold mission: help address the diversity of PHAS graduate students among multiple axes, and build capacity to address equity and inclusion issues in the long term.
A two day workshop held at UBC campus will host 25 talented rising junior and senior undergraduate women and underrepresented groups from various international and national institutions interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy. The participants will have the opportunity to learn about physics research programs and graduate student life at UBC, engage in conversations with faculty members, research scientists and graduate students, experience an afternoon in a laboratory, visiting laboratories, and learn strategies for improving their graduate school applications.

Recipients: Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology

Description: This new project addresses some of the ways instructors can go beyond Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to support active learning for learners with disabilities, emerging from experiences where UDL was not sufficiently inclusive. UDL guides learning design for a diverse array of learners by default. However, active learning techniques often contain more nuance that is lost in the UDL framework of “expression, representation, and engagement”. We will address how to effectively redesign active learning techniques that meet learner and meta-objective needs through a learning design guide and video case-studies.

Recipients: Enrolment Services

Description: Online training is currently provided to 280+ UBC faculty, staff, and alumni to support assessments of 70,000+ UBC Personal Profiles, submitted by applicants to Undergraduate Admissions for direct-entry degrees at both campuses, annually. It is assessed by Readers against a rubric. The scores comprise the non-academic assessment for the adjudication of: undergraduate admissions decisions, the Presidential Scholars Awards; the Centennial Scholars Awards, and international student scholarships.
The 2019 Equity Enhancement Fund grant, has allowed inclusion of research-based EDI content. In our 2019 EEF project stakeholder feedback was the need for further dialogue with campus partners who work with Indigenous students, and to deepen EDI content with an Indigenous trauma-informed approach. The focus of Phase II is to improve EDI content of the Reader training in support of UBC’s commitment to reconciliation and decolonization, and UBC’s ISP and IAP.

Recipients: Faculty of Medicine

Description: This project will use research-based theatre to engage graduate students, faculty and staff in discussing diversity and inclusivity in supervisory relationships. In 2019, we piloted Don’t Rock the Boat (DRTB), a theatre workshop with 6 dramatized scenes about the challenges of graduate supervisory relationships, interspersed with facilitated dialogue. Audience feedback confirms the model creates a shared experience that allows participants to discuss characters and situations without having to share personal stories, making it effective in encouraging discussion of sensitive issues. To support ongoing dialogue on supervisory relationships, we are revising DRTB to produce an online module with video resources and a facilitator guide including new material on visible and invisible diversity, and inclusivity in the graduate student learning and supervisory environment. We will offer and evaluate 6 video-based workshops, refine the facilitator guide based on input and promote the resource.

Recipients: Museum of Anthropology

Description: The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) has made a strategic commitment to address issues of Accessibility, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This includes a commitment to improve accessibility for all visitors within its physical and virtual spaces. In 2020, MOA will install two handicap-accessible doors to its Koerner Ceramics Gallery, ensuring all entrances to its public galleries are wheelchair accessible. One of its faculty curators is part of a TLEF project exploring the use of touchable objects created through 3-D printing to enhance teaching, research, and the experience of the visually impaired. Now, MOA proposes to contract Sina Bahram and Corey Timpson, two accessibility specialists, to conduct an audit and create a roadmap to guide future work. MOA initially met with Sina Bahram in 2019 and was impressed with his commitment and expertise. This work is critical for MOA to develop internal capacity to design inclusive and equitable experiences for all its visitors.

Recipients: Vantage College

Description: Vantage College is a first-year program with embedded language support designed for international students who meet UBC’s academic requirements but who do not yet meet the English language proficiency requirements. Research indicates that first-year international students and English language learners have greater adjustment challenges, as they experience more stress and anxiety compared to domestic students. In the six years since the start of Vantage College, educators in the program have been exploring strategies to better include, engage, and support our students. Our experiences and reflections are transferable to the broader UBC community of educators teaching international students, first-year students, and English language learners. Informed by student focus groups, the project aims to develop a new symposium where Vantage College educators can share what we have learned and participate in dialogues with the wider UBC community of educators on strategies that include, engage, and support first-year international English language learners and to share ideas on opportunities to do more.

Recipients: Faculty of Medicine

Description: The project offers faculty and staff in the Faculty the opportunity to participate in an Indigenous Cultural Safety Program that is Indigenous led and specifically developed with an academic and research context. The learning experience covers topics including: recognizing and addressing the power imbalances and discriminations inherent to academic and health care institutional structures; understanding the historical, current, and ongoing impacts of colonialism on the health and wellness of Indigenous Peoples; and learning how to move forward and conduct our work in a good way.

The program provides training with levels of learning designed to support individuals with self-reflection and the practice of humility. Each of the learning opportunities ensures a circle of safety and allow space for participants to engage in meaningful discussions around personal unconscious and conscious biases in discussions of colonization and its impacts.

Recipients: UBC Geering Up Engineering Outreach

Description: Indigenous youth represent the fastest-growing demographic in Canada, yet Indigenous students make up just 1% of undergraduates in engineering. As such, we are cultivating a cohort of Indigenous high school students who will be ready to pursue future employment and education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) through our Indigenous Internship Program. This project will be a new program for Geering Up and the first of its kind in the Faculty of Applied Science (APSC).

Using funds from the UBC EEF and our partners at Actua, we will hire five Indigenous students in Grades 11-12 as Outreach Interns for three weeks. The position is designed to provide Indigenous youth with the knowledge and experience needed to teach STEM through training, networking, and hands-on experience as instructors in classrooms. After one week of training, the Outreach Interns will join our Outreach Instructors for two weeks to deliver STEM programming in First Nations communities across BC.

Recipients: Department of Sociology, and Academic English (Vantage)

Description: This new project advances inclusive teaching and learning by expanding faculty and GTA awareness of linguistic justice in practices for assessing student learning (Piller, 2016). The proposed project will enhance the capacity of a cohort of faculty and graduate students (Inclusive Assessment Fellows (IAFs) listed as project partners) to conceptualize linguistic diversity as an axis of inequality shaping post-secondary education. The IAF cohort will engage with SoTL literature on linguistic justice and receive training in evidence-based inclusive assessment interventions for multiple choice exams. Research shows that the linguistic structure of multiple choice questions exacerbates performance gaps between students who have English as a first language and students who have English as an additional language (Abedi & Gandara, 2006). Our project trains and pairs faculty with GTAs to revise their UBC exam questions based on linguistic inclusion principles from Riccardi et al. (2020).

Recipients: Abril Soewarso-Rivera, UBC Department of Psychology 

Description: At its heart, Love in Public is a podcast designed to explore how radical, empathetic listening serves as a conduit for bridging social divides. It is a new student-run initiative that aims to provide intentional space for intimate, conversational interviews with racialized students, faculty, and alumni of the UBC community on a range of social justice issues. By staging interactions with individuals who are differently situated, Love in Public acts as a breathing testament to the capacity of listening as a powerful antidote to prejudice and as a means of recognizing our common humanity.

Recipients: Sandra Todd, UBC Bookstore

Description: On the mezzanine level of the UBC Bookstore there are full length windows overlooking the carved pole of the indigenous man and the snake. Currently, small coffee tables and chairs are scattered around that area used by students and staff mainly, eating lunch or studying. The plan is to take back half the area that is on the side of the building overlooking the totem pole and to replace the coffee tables and chairs with 4 pod style chairs equipped with head phones and small screens similar to screens on airplanes. The story of the land UBC sits on will be told via the headphones and the screens to welcome our visitors by introducing them to the Musqueam People.

Recipients: Department of Psychology

Description: International students are susceptible to a unique set of stressors, including profound homesickness, visa-related issues, academic-performance issues that can affect their ability to stay in Canada, high tuition fees, and idiosyncratic cultural demands/issues. Collectively, these stressors make international students highly susceptible to mental health issues and mental illness. Moreover, stigma is a major barrier to adequate mental health care for many international students. This project aims to address the needs of international students by developing a culturally-appropriate form of mental health support.

Recipients: Department of Psychology

Description: Patient involvement in health professional education is important for students (future health care providers) to understand the diversity of the patient experience and provide culturally sensitive health care. Patient & Community Partnership for Education, Office of UBC Health, helps students and faculty to find and support patients to fulfill a variety of educational roles. Although we have a sizable pool of patients we can call on to meet increasing requests, we need to increase the diversity of our pool and facilitate inclusion of people who may need additional supports to overcome barriers to participation. In this new project our objectives are to: i) recruit, support and retain a greater number and diversity of patients to meet current and future demands and fulfill multiple roles; ii) build a network of community organizations through which we can recruit ‘harder to reach’ populations; iii) identify barriers to participation and the supports required.

Recipients: African Caribbean Student Club

Description: The African Caribbean Culture Week is a yearly series of events during Black History Month aimed at celebrating and promoting a space of inclusion for members of the diaspora within and outside of the UBCO campus. The past school year, we were able to achieve great things and bring life to Black History Month, especially with the Kelowna community. These include: radio interviews, a declaration of the acknowledgement of Black History Month by the Mayor and televising our various events. This past year, we have also expanded past the capacity of a single week, and created and organized events throughout the month. These activities include: an Afro-hair workshop, two UBUNTU chats discussing various issues in African and Caribbean communities, Taste of Africa and the Caribbean (which served food from Africa and the Caribbean), Take Me Out which is our valentines day special event to promote connectedness and inclusivity, and our Annual ACSC Legacy Gala, which took place at the Coast Capri Hotel. At every event we have made a conscious effort to promote inclusion and participation not only amongst out own members, but from everyone on the UBCO campus. The funding will go entirely to the celebration of Black History Month and allow us to organize events that will accurately represent the African and Caribbean diaspora. We achieved our goals this year of increasing diversity in an effort to promote understanding and collaboration in UBCO as well as in the Kelowna community. We hope to continue this trend of success and progress in the coming school year and make more strides in promoting diversity, inclusivity and equity.

Recipients: UBC Wellbeing

Description: Allyship 101 envisions hosting a panel and workshop-training that will equip participants to be allies. To support sustainability, a digital storytelling component would also be developed where a series of video shorts would highlight UBC examples of equity, diversity, and inclusion, to be hosted on the UBC website. It is understood that the word "ally" is used frequently and means different things to different people. This project endeavors to create the space for common ground where exploring consciousness raising and shared language at UBC would increase participating members' capacity to do the work of allyship, fostering shifts at an institutional level. With a project/lead partner being UBC Okanagan Human Resources, the training workshop and digital storytelling would have a workplace focus, targeting faculty and staff.

Recipients: College of Graduate Studies

Description: The College of Graduate studies will host a two-day workshop series for graduate students that will result in a Cultural Awareness and Social Equity certificate endorsed by our office. These workshops will focus on building awareness around social and cultural difference, diversity, inclusion, and equity, and will partner with relevant organizations on campus including the Aboriginal Programs and Services, International Programs and Services, and the Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Office with additional support from the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal. We will also invite community speakers to give short presentations interspersed between the workshops. Additionally, the workshop will be part of a larger program to provide micro-credentials on multiple topics for graduate students in order to aid in employment. Both this two-day workshop and the micro-credentialing program are new initiatives.

Recipients: Library

Description: This new project aims to build capacity within the Library to enact the goals of the Inclusion Action Plan, related to the themes of inclusion and collaboration, through a student internship that will support, develop, and lead projects within the Library related to equity, diversity, and inclusion. This internship will fund one undergraduate student from a historically, persistently, and systemically marginalized group within the UBC community to propose and develop projects, and work one-on-one with Library and Student Learning Hub employees. Projects can include, but are not limited to, collection development, display development (books, digital etc.), programming, outreach initiatives, LibGuides, etc. The goals for this internship are for projects to be developed and completed based on the student’s interests and professional goals. This will be used as a pilot project to determine feasibility for ongoing funding within the Library.

Recipients: Computer Science, Applied Science

Description: We are incorporating image processing technology to assist differently abled people to open building doors without having to manually push the button to open the door. This project serves to be an implementation of a system using existing open-source resources to aid accessing large entrances, and not a research project. We will start with the entrances of the Commons-Library building, then later to other buildings where accessibility is difficult.

Recipients: Kimberly Rutledge (Psychology), Kassidy Rutledge (Arts)

Description: The goal of the Student Mentors for Inclusive Learning and Education (SMILE) program is to continue fostering an academic and social environment that is equitable in that it supports equal opportunity. We believe that University is much more than attending classes and that learning can happen beyond the walls of our classrooms. For students with intellectual disabilities, there are additional barriers to getting involved in extra-curriculars, socializing, and feeling like they truly belong within our UBC community. The goal of SMILE is to connect students with intellectual disabilities with peers who have similar interests and personalities, and to support them in building a friendship. SMILE team members will support students through buddy matching, event ideas/planning (i.e. coffee dates, going to the movies), reimbursement for outings, and continuous mentorship.

Recipients: AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre 

Description: In alignment with UBC’s definition of equity and commitment to inclusion, this project recognizes that support services cannot use the same model for all survivors of sexualized violence. Some students, particularly those historically marginalized at UBC such as queer, trans, people of colour students, confront additional barriers accessing services, including a lack of knowledge and fear of bias from service providers. By providing training to support service providers and developing support group curriculum centring QTPOC perspectives, this project will develop a model for equitable support that will last beyond the funding period.

Recipients: Go Global: International Learning Programs 

Description: A Place to Stand, A World to Explore program is modeled after the University of Otago’s Tūrangawaewae, Pōkai Whenua program which connects Indigenous students from different communities with one another globally. This program seeks to provide an opportunity for Indigenous students at UBC to participate in international Exchanges in New Zealand and Australia while connecting with Indigenous communities in those countries. The program also creates opportunities for Indigenous students at our partner universities to study at UBC and learn more about the land on which we learn and live.

Recipients: CiTR Radio 101.9FM 

Description: This project will support the development of an accessibility policy for CiTR & Discorder’s members and leadership, a breathing disabilities language guide for media creators, and a venue accessibility resource for the greater Vancouver arts community. The Accessibility Media Collective at CiTR & Discorder provides a platform for students and community members with diverse abilities to produce content around self-determined topics of interest. By increasing programming on accessibility at CiTR, we increase awareness of equity issues on and off campus, facilitate discussion that involves a variety of constituents, and support students and community members to create programming on equity related topics.

Recipients: UBC Enrolment Services 

Description: Online training is currently provided to more than 130 UBC faculty & staff, and 150 UBC alumni in support of their assessments of more than 70,000 UBC Personal Profiles annually. The UBC Personal Profile is submitted by applicants as part of the UBC Undergraduate Application to all direct-entry degree programs at both UBC campuses. These assessments currently support the adjudication of: undergraduate admissions decisions; the Presidential Scholars Awards; the Centennial Scholars Awards; the International Major Entrance Scholarships; and the Outstanding International Student Awards. The Personal Profile is assessed by Readers against a rubric. The current Reader training includes material on inclusion training but there is a new opportunity to deepen the content, ensure it is based on evidence, provide support past bias awareness, create a new evaluation mechanism, and integrate the feedback from underrepresented and/or marginalized groups.

Recipients: Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Education

Description: UBC’s Strategy for Advancing Equity and Diversity rightfully calls for increased inclusion of individuals with disabilities, who experience numerous challenges, especially in health and human service programs, which feature both academic and clinical settings. The UBC Inclusive Campus project—a cutting-edge team of faculty, staff, clinicians and students that I lead—has heard students with disabilities express hurdles to their participation, in particular due to stigma and attitudinal barriers. This project will present stories from students with disabilities at UBC (both campuses) using an innovative, drama-based approach, which has yielded positive preliminary results. The cast will include students with disabilities, faculty members and student artists. We will perform and discuss this piece in front of students, staff and faculty. We hope that this embodied form of discourse will bring disability discussions centre stage, and consequently promote an inclusive climate at UBC.

Recipients: UBC Afrocentrism Conference, UBC Africa Awareness Initiative, UBC Africa Business Club, and UBC Global Lounge 

Description: The Afrocentrism Conference: Decolonizing Academia 2019 is dedicated to starting the conversation of improving the inclusivity in western Canadian education curricula by emphasizing an Afrocentric approach. The Conference aims to inspire UBC students and the Vancouver community on the untapped potential and possibilities of various disciplines concerned with and surrounding people of African descent in Canada, the diaspora and the continent. The exclusion of Afrocentric perspectives in major academic disciplines at UBC contributes to the patronizing image of Africa as object, rather than subject. The Conference will provide diverse contributions of Black/African scholars to a variety of academic fields so as to create an interactive platform and opportunity for UBC students, staff, faculty and Vancouver community to experience a unique learning experience. 3675445

Recipients: AMS First Generation Students Union (FGSU) and UBC School of Journalism  

Description: UBC First Generation Students Union (FGSU) aims to create a podcast series to highlight the narratives of first-generation university students and faculty members at UBC. From a wide spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, first-generation university students are among the first in their families to attend a post-secondary institution. Their success in university is greatly impacted by cultural, financial, and psychological obstacles. Each bi-weekly, 15-minute podcast will invite two first-generation individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives to address challenges and interventions for the inclusion of first-generation individuals in both academic and work environments at UBC. This will be the first student-led initiative in any Canadian university that specifically caters to the first-generation demographic.

Recipients: Faculty of Applied Science and UBC .calSES

Description: The American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) is a non-profit association that has partnered with various organizations across North America to support Indigeneity in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Canadian representation within AISES has been increasing recently (Canadian Indigenous Science and Engineering Society - .caISES). UBC had an active chapter from 2009-2014.

This project will support the initial work of the newly reformed .caISES chapter. Our work will be focused in 4 key support areas:

1. Networking/career opportunities
2. Indigenous Student Retention at the undergraduate and graduate levels
3. STEM Outreach to Indigenous youth (British Columbia and beyond)
4. Providing a Indigenous student voice to inform policy

.caISES recognizes that Indigenous students are still underrepresented in STEM fields in Canada and feel equipped to speak to the challenges.

Recipients: Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS)  

Description: A growing number of UBC students with disabilities experience mental health challenges and difficulties with advanced academic skills like studying, taking exams, planning, and organization. This project will address these challenges by providing specialized support and skill building for students with disabilities at UBC. Through providing these supports, equity will be enhanced through improving students’ access to academic opportunities and building students’ capacity to meet their own academic goals. These services will also involve group skill building activities that strengthen the social and support networks of this group of diverse learners. This project promotes equity and inclusion at UBC by ensuring that students with disabilities can fully participate in all campus activities and grow in their capacity to self-advocate. It also aligns with the new UBC strategic plan by focusing on improving student wellbeing who are known to experience a lack of connection on campus.

Recipients: Faculty of Arts 

Description: This is a three-part project intended to explore and enhance the experiences of new racialized faculty at UBC. The first stage of the project will involve conducting research on the needs, experiences, and challenges of racialized faculty in their first years at UBC. Although there are various resources and programs dedicated to faculty orientation, both centrally and Faculty-based, UBC has not yet examined how, if at all, the needs and experiences of racialized faculty differ and how such unique needs and experiences can be best supported. As a collaborative project, we will draw from multiple perspectives and mandates to pursue a shared objective: to enhance equity and inclusion at UBC. The project follows from the understanding that successful recruitment of diverse faculty requires their retention and that the deep engagement of diverse faculty has a profound and positive impact on all members of the University community.

Recipients: First Nations and Indigenous Studies, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies 

Description: The Indigenous Media Collective is a collaborative project developed and led by the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program (FNIS) with the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS) and supported by CiTR to promote Indigenous perspectives and empower Indigenous and allied studies through training and participation in broadcasting and multimedia initiatives.

Through this iteration of the project, we intend to support and expand the existing Indigenous Media Collective at CiTR, to include not only traditional broadcasting, but also radio documentaries and written journalism – both in print through CiTR’s monthly publication Discorder and online through the CiTR and CIS websites. The ethos of maintaining a safe, productive space for Indigenous and non-Indigenous studies will remain, but the Collective will not manifest with a multimedia presence. We want to increase the Collective’s capacity, providing more opportunities for members to produce new content, attend conferences, and host path clearing speaker series.

Recipients: Forestry Diversity Crew, Faculty of Forestry 

Description: Our vision is a thriving diverse community in our faculty. The “Forestry Diversity Crew” aims to build upon our past successes, as well as add new dimensions to our diversity programming drawing on survey data from our community. We build on our past approaches and activities to add new workshops specially tailored to specific groups within our Forestry community (e.g. undergrads, faculty, students, rainbow people, allies, international students). We are also planning new events to enhance networking and community building among everyone. One entirely new initiative includes a quantitative survey of student well-being and understanding of inclusivity. We will also specifically target the undergraduate community who has been somewhat less involved (to date) in our initiatives. Lastly, we propose to develop a pilot “Seedlings and Saplings” program to provide supportive community-based activities for kids at selected after hours Forestry events to enable more participation by students, staff, and faculty who are parents and might otherwise be dissuaded to child-care responsibilities.

Recipients: The Wingspan Collaborative, President's Working Committee on Disability Culture, Arts & Equity 

Description: The Wingspan Collaborative is an intellectual 'studio' of interdisciplinary scholars in disability studies, arts, culture and public pedagogy across many disciplines at UBC who collaborate on common projects regarding the rights of people with disabilities and who proactively promote the idea that while individual disabilities pose impairments, they should not be seen as deficits but instead as differences that enrich collective human experience and the arts. We identify variously as disabled, non-disabled or as arts who focus on disability aesthetics and linger in the liminal spaces between and among arts/researcher/teacher in the broadest sense of these terms, hence we are Dis/A/Tographers in an unequal global world. This project will involve staging a high -profile dis/arts and disability studies Series which makes the ordinary and extraordinary lives of artists and scholars with disabilities take centre stage in artistic, accessible and imaginative ways.

Recipients: Office of the Ombudsperson for Students 

Description: Excellence in graduate supervision is integral to excellence in graduate education, research, student learning, student health and wellbeing and an outstanding work environment at UBC. The diversity of UBC Vancouver’s community and UBC’s commitment to equity and inclusion necessitate a broad and deep awareness and understanding of intercultural differences and the development of intercultural fluency. This is critically important in the realm of graduate supervision where the power differential is marked and the nature of the supervisory relationship can be isolating. This project is a collaboration between the Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies, the Graduate Student Society, Student Wellbeing Promotion, The International House and the Office of the Ombudsperson for Students. It aims to:

• Promote a campus-wide dialogue about intercultural understanding and the role of diversity and inclusion in supervision excellence, one that broadens our awareness of cultural through an intersectional lens.
• Conduct focus groups to gain insight and input into the issue of intercultural fluency and supervision. Data and information collected will inform the symposium and potential training/education initiatives to build competencies and tools for students, staff and faculty to self-reflect and interact with difference in ways that are mutually beneficial within the graduate student-supervisor relationship.
• Develop and present a symposium, inviting researchers, senior administrators and students to share experiences, data, and best practices on supervision excellence that promotes diversity and inclusion.
• Develop a template for a workshop on intercultural fluency in graduate supervision based on the data, research and insights gained through the focus group discussions and the symposium.
• Develop a set of recommendations regarding graduate supervision excellence in the context of intercultural fluency and present to key stakeholders and Vice-Presidents Students, Research, Academic, and Human Resources.

Recipients: Faculty of Medicine 

Description: Multiprofessional and interprofessional experiential opportunities for students to learn from people with visible and non-visible disabilities are offered by Patient & Community Partnership for Education in the Office of UBC Health. The purpose of this project is to extend opportunities to learn directly from people living with a disability by producing and learning modules that illustrate multiple perspectives on three commonly experienced problems: stereotypes; barriers to access; communication challenges. Learning materials will be co-developed by students and people with disabilities who are volunteer mentors in the UBC Interprofessional Health Mentors program and used to enhance existing and new curricula. The ultimate goal is to ensure UBC students are well prepared to meet future healthcare needs through incorporation of the perspectives living with disabilities in their education. Read the final report here.

Recipients: Faculty of Education 

Description: The 2016 pilot Teacher Education for All! (TEFA) focused on beginning to build capacity for students (pre-service teachers), faculty and staff in UBC’s Teacher Education Program in order to create and nurture an inclusive culture, work place and learning environment. The pilot set up a Teacher Education for All! Working Group of Bed faculty, staff and students to review policies, conduct curriculum mapping across the Bed Program courses, offer workshops, and produce an LGB/T2/Q inclusion statement for Bed syllabi. The proposed 2017-18 project extends the pilot through creating and comping resources into a digital clearinghouse, enhance an inclusive environment in the Faculty of Education by providing an extensive menu of learning opportunities and workshops at all levels to build teacher candidate and instructor capacity for LGB/T2/Q inclusion in their own lives and teaching careers. The year would culminate with a TEFA conference.

Recipients: Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies  

Description: Confluence: A Women’s Water Circle puts into action creative new ways for Indigenous people and settlers to peacefully come together to voice our care and concerns for local watersheds. In this one-day forum, an inclusive facilitation design engages people in an innovative community water circle process to advance sustainable solutions that begin in sharing our stories as neighbors. Small group discussions are interspersed with water-themed cultural presentations: music, poetry, theatre, media and visual arts. The two keynote presentations outline vital relations between Syilx women and water, and suggest how newcomers to Syilx territory can respectfully learn more about sustainable ways of co-existence. This forum will be documented in photos, video and a final creative report for web publication. This significant equity and community-building event will strengthen understanding and deepen partnerships with UBC and community members in the Columbia River Watershed Storytelling project as an ongoing initiative with Okanagan Nation Alliance.

Recipients: School of Social Work, Faculty of Health and Social Development 

Description: This project aims to create opportunities for a diverse range of audience, on & off UBCO campus, to gain literacy in Canadian history. The telling/teaching of the history of historically marginalized groups in Canada are often incomplete, stigmatizing and uninspiring. Re-telling of history by those who know it best, such as the descendants of those who have been oppressed, address omissions/distortions of key details, contexts, and perspectives. In collaboration with Inspired World Café Society, community events for promoting history literacy in diverse audiences via the retelling of Canadian history from the perspective of descendants will be offered. This important initiative meets UBC’s commitment of student learning, community engagement, intercultural communication, and international engagement (the “international” is here, not just overseas). Sustainability is by having key organizations (e.g., school district, UBCO units) run their own series post-collaboration to design each community event for each speaker that matches their audience.

Recipients: Latin Dance Club 

Description: Through documentary and animation, this project will increase awareness and create dialogue about racial and cultural barriers to integration in Okanagan. We will collect stories of discrimination through interviews and include animations. Story animations allow audiences to hear interviewees share their story while seeing an animation of the story unfold. It is the newest and most popular form of documentary-making and this project will be the first of its kind in Kelowna. Following the documentary production, we intend to organize a keynote speaker event a workshop where we will screen the documentary and facilitate small-group discussions. This project is in partnership with Jin Park of Okanagan Korean Culture and Knowledge Society and Mr. Ismaël Traoré.

Recipients: Indigenous Student Association

Description: The Syilx mural will be a unique student let community art project on University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus. The imagery will be inspired by the Indigenous nation, upon whose unceded territory our campus is located, and their language Nsyilxcen. Indigenous Students envision the mural to be representational and possess colourful, contemporary with Syilx motifs. The symbolism will be aesthetically pleasing as well as meaningful. Syilx artist Sheldon Louis Pierre will mentor Indigenous students and co-create mural. Unveiling of the piece may include a DJ set by Coast-Salish artist Ronnie Dean Harris to commemorate the completed project. We anticipate the unveiling to be a welcoming and interactive environment where everyone can partake and learn.

Recipients: First Nations Studies Students Association

Photo by John Wolf S. at the 2015 UBC Pow-wow from Facebook

Description: In response to the lack of indigenous cultural celebrations on campus, FNSSA hosts an annual pow-wow to celebrate the resiliency, vibrancy and diversity of indigenous peoples. The pow-wow has taken place annually since 2015 and will be entering its third year in April 2017.

Pow-wows are a celebration of life through song and dance. It originates from the Nehiyaw (Cree First Nations) people, east of the Rocky Mountains. The title, “Nehiyo-paskwa-itsimowin” is Cree itself, “nehiyo” is a greeting for Cree people, “paskwa” refers to the prairies where the celebration originated and “simowan” means the way he/she dances.

Recipients: UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM)

Description: This project will consist of monthly seminar discussion groups starting in Fall 2016 to examine the intersections of race, gender, and violence, especially as they impact Asian student communities.

The seminar discussions will open up spaces for students to share experiences and resources, build analyses, and discuss strategies of organizing against sexual and other forms of violence at UBC and within Asian communities in Canada. The series will culminate in a public symposium in spring 2017 to bring these conversations to a wider audience at UBC and beyond.

Recipients: Faculty of Forestry

The goal of the initiative is to develop a suite of new diversity and inclusion initiatives across the Faculty of Forestry. It will included development of educational and awareness materials and an undergraduate quality-of-life survey.

They are planning a Diversity & Inclusion Series with panel discussions and speaker series on topics chosen in consultation with the Forestry Undergraduate Society (FUS), Forestry Graduate Student Association (FGSA), Forestry Orientation Leaders (FOL), as well faculty and staff.

Recipients: UBC Debate Society

The UBC Debate Society is planning the first Women’s Tournament at UBC welcoming all who are non-male identifying. They aim to have a predominantly non-male judging panel and a non-male head judge in each room. Partnering with other organizations they will publicize the event on campus, encouraging newcomers who have never debated before to participate (debating, judging or spectating).

The tournament will consist of a training session, two days of debate, a series of prominent feminist speakers, and a women’s forum to allow participants to share their views on their experiences with oppression.

Recipients: UBC Library

The Diversity and Inclusion Team at the UBC Library will build a training program for employees at UBC-V and UBC-O. Three main elements are: place-based learning visits to Musqueam, the Ki-Low-Na Friendship Society, and the Sncewips Heritage Museum; in-person workshops (later available online); and a Shared Learnings event at both campuses.

This program will gather data to inform workshop design and will educate Library employees about ways that they can respectfully engage with and support Indigenous initiatives within their work at UBC. The project will propel the Library forward in providing excellent services to Aboriginal patrons and non-Aboriginal patrons.

Recipients: Faculty of Education

The Cultivating Creative Communities project aims to build and sustain global relationships between UBC student teachers at the Vancouver campus and UBC Moi student teachers at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya by offering expressive arts workshops. The intention is to support teacher’s professional development in the arts and to encourage a cross-pollination of ideas and knowledge exchange between graduate students. The project has three stages.

Stage One: The UBC student teachers at the Vancouver campus and UBC Moi student teachers at Dadaab refugee camp will each be presented with an opportunity to explore their personal experiences of attending the graduate teaching program by creating a photo self portrait and a six word memoir. These portraits will be exchanged between the two groups to encourage building collegial relationships.

Stage Two: Two one-day workshops will be offered at both the UBC Vancouver campus and the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) Centre at the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya and will explore themes of personal creative expression, gender equality and equity, peace, and conflict resolution.For the purpose of generating new teaching strategies in the arts in the classrooms.

Stage Three: In 2017, an art exhibit entitled Cultivating Creative Communities: Building and sustaining global student relationships will present the creative expressions and personal experiences of the students who participated in this project.

The project aims to encourage intercultural dialogue and foster cultural awareness between UBC-Moi student teachers and UBC Vancouver campus students as a way of building sustainable relationships.

Recipients: RAGA Student Networks

The second Racialized Students Resistance (RSR) Conference will be held on Musqueam Lands at UBC on May 29, 2017. This one-day conference will offer a platform to address subtle/explicit institutional systems of racialized violence and oppression. RSR 2017 will be organized by and for racialized members of our scholarly and advocacy community and will be open to a diversity of people who identify as racialized (e.g. Indigenous, Black, people of colour, mixed race).

The conference aims to create a space for racialized presenters and attendees to advance education, scholarship and dialogue on critical race, Indigenous, anti-colonial, queer, and feminist theories and practice. The conference will include a mix of presentations by students, faculty, and community members, and workshops to build on participant skills and experiences (e.g. navigating white academia, engaging in self-care and creating safe spaces, building solidarities and coalitions among racialized groups, resources available to racialized individuals, etc.)

Recipients: UBC Africa Awareness Initiative

UBC Afindisé is a brand new project developed by AAI, UBC’s most prominent African student-led organization, a club committed to fully improving discourse surrounding Africa and the ever-growing African diasporic community at UBC. This dialogue series aims at unleashing the power of intergenerational dialogue, a common value and tradition shared across the continent, in order to provide the UBC African minority with a platform to foster inter and intracultural understanding on campus (1st pillar), address the specificities of their struggles at UBC (2nd pillar), and explore ways to overcome them through critical and in-depth discussions with their “elders” (3rd pillar).

The voice of Africa is not loud enough on campus. Indeed, only two African Studies courses are offered at UBC (AFST 250 and AFST 352). Therefore, this project will also serve as a promotional tool to expand the AFST Minor Program (an Afindisé petition for the development of the Minor will be launched).

Recipients: UBC Medical Undergraduate Society

Limited policy and resources exists to inform accommodations for medical learners – where trainees are responsible for direct patient care in ever-changing environments (ie. clinic, ward, operating room) and where a great deal of stigma exists to disclose their disabilities to patients, peers, and supervisors.

UBC learners have begun to express their challenges through national and peer reviewed publications and the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Our goal is to identify challenges and opportunities for creating inclusive clinical learning, building on the work of the Inclusive Campus project led by Dr. Tal Janus, professor in UBC Occupational Science & Therapy.

Recipients: Faculty of Education

The Teacher Education for All project will build capacity for faculty, staff and students in Teacher education to create and provide an inclusive culture, workplace, and learning environment with a particular focus on the intersectional approaches to thinking about sexual and gender diversity and pedagogical approaches to recognize, and intervene to transform, the impacts of systemic discrimination.

Recipients: UBC Stem Cell Club

Patients with blood cancers may require a stem cell transplant as part of their treatment. However, 80% of patients do not have a suitable match in their family, and must find an unrelated donor. Canada’s stem cell donor-database is used to match potential donors to patients. Individuals age 17-35 can register to join this database at stem cell drives, where they swab their cheeks to provide a tissue sample for a DNA test. Finding a match for transplant is difficult – especially for non-Caucasians, who are underrepresented on Canada’s donor-database.

In 2011, we founded the Stem Cell Club, aiming to improve equity in access to stem cell donors. To date, we have coordinated dozens of stem cell drives at campuses across British Columbia, and recruited over 5500 potential stem cell donors (representing 1% of donors on Canada’s donor-database). Our team specifically targets recruitment of ethnically-diverse donors, including Aboriginal Peoples (53% of the donors we register are non-Caucasian). Our initiative increases the chances for patients from these ethnic groups to find a suitable genetic match for stem cell transplant. Our drives establish informal learning spaces on campus, where students educate other students about the need for stem cell donors from all ethnicities.

Recipients: UBC Department of History

The Intersectional Asian Canadian Initiative (IACI)is dedicated to creating a safe platform for people of Asian Canadian descent to raise public consciousness of the historical and contemporary issues that affect and influence their identity as Canadian citizens, in particular concern to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and heritage. By engaging with members of Asian diaspora communities, the Intersectional Asian Canadian Initiative (IACI) aims towards validating the many ways in which Asian Canadians understand their identity, and stresses that there is no pluralistic experience under Canadian citizenship.

In order to reverse the process of historical erasure, the Intersectional Asian Canadian Initiative (IACI) is aimed towards celebrating, remembering, and sharing the lives of Asian Canadians. The Intersectional Asian Canadian Initiative (IACI) is dedicated to cultivating a safe space where Asian Canadians can find a strong sense of community, regain the voices that have previously been unheard, and empowering communities who have faced historical and systemic oppression.

Recipients: The F-Word Conference Planning Committee and the Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Undergraduate Student Association

The F-Word Planning Committee acknowledges that the conference will be taking place on UBC Vancouver campus, which is on the unceded territories of the Musqueam Nation. The F-Word Conference showcases student research and community collaboration across activist and academic disciplines. The conference provides a venue for feminist scholars, students, activists, and community members to learn each other's skills, knowledge(s), and experiences. The Conference consists of keynote presentations; student panel presentations and workshops lead by community organizations.

Since the conference will be dealing with difficult topics, such as sexual assault, racism and colonialism, it is in our best interest to provide a safe and welcoming space for our guests. We will be providing “safe(r)space” areas and volunteers to support those who may feel triggered by the content being presented.

Recipients: Indigenous Students Association

Given the lack of inclusive Indigenous cultural events on campus, our goal is to maintain an Indigenous Sharing Series throughout the 2016-2017 academic year to celebrate Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history, as well as engaging the UBC and Vancouver community in a productive and supportive relationship to discuss Indigenous topics. As we occupy unceded Musqueam territory we will be consulting with Musqueam throughout the series.

Recipients: UBC Learning Exchange

The project is to develop an orientation package that helps students learn about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) for use by the UBC Learning Exchange, faculty and staff on campus, and DTES organizations. We aim to help students and faculty better understand the strengths, opportunities and challenges of social inequity facing communities like the DTES.

In Phase 1 (EEF 2015) we updated existing orientation materials and created new self-directed tours, fact sheets and a video. In Phase 2 we will diversify the materials, collaborate with campus and community partners in implementation, explore involvement of DTES residents in orientations, and evaluate impact. The project enhances equity by directly involving DTES residents as experts with lived experience who put a human face to an often misunderstood and underrepresented community to counter stereotypes and negative perceptions. We hope to change the discourse of the DTES as a place of fear and hopelessness.

Recipients: Dion Kaszas, student in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies

The fire to revive Indigenous tattooing has been ignited in North America; this projects objective is to host a residency style training program that will help fulfill the need for trained cultural tattoo practitioners in Canada. It will work with four Indigenous artists who will in the end be qualified professional cultural practitioners that are trained in design application, cultural and spiritual safety, and the health aspects of tattooing. During this residency emphasis will be placed on health and safety with the trainees being certified in blood borne pathogens. They will undertake research into their cultural and ancestral tattooing tradition, cultural protocols that relate to the application and practice of tattooing in each community, and design application. The expected outcomes include the full training of these artists in the practice of traditional tattooing, including the practice of hand poke and skin stitch tattooing and a clear conviction of their responsibilities as cultural practitioners. Each artist will be building an essential set of skills that will be part of the decolonization process and the healing of their respective communities in the revival of a key cultural artistic tradition and returning a practice that will strengthen individuals in their own cultural identity.

Recipients: Casey Hamilton, Campus Health Specialist and Liz Hilliard, Campus Life

Food insecurity at UBC Okanagan is not well understood. This project aims to change this by researching food insecurity on campus, as well as through hosting ‘Breaking Bread’ dialogue dinners, and other programs and events. Relationships will be built with existing community food security programs to connect students to them and to further develop student leadership opportunities.

Recipients: Laura Thorne and Barbara Sobol, UBC Okanagan Library and Jaclyn Salter, Student and Student Library Advisory Council member

The 2017 Human Library event at UBC Okanagan will position various community members as “books” representing diverse backgrounds, opinions, and perspectives and allow the campus community to interact with them as “readers.” The aim is to challenge stereotypes and prejudices while further developing an understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Recipients: Siona Koker and the UBC Students’ Union Okanagan Women’s Resource Centre

This initiative will further develop the Tea Talks project, which hosts ongoing seminar workshops which address a range of topics from body shaming to sexism, violence against Indigenous women to conversations around racism and hair.

Recipients:Students from the faculties of Arts, Sciences and School of Nursing, partnered with Okanagan Korean Culture & Knowledge Society

Through a series of short story animations for a documentary, this project will increase awareness and create dialogue about racism in the Okanagan. The group will collect stories of racism through interviews and animate them, allowing audiences to hear interviewees share their stories while an animation unfolds.

Recipients: AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC)

Description: The AMS Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) is launching a new program this year to encourage male identified students to get involved in creating an awesome, safe and caring community. The Creating Healthier Masculinities Leadership Program is a multi-faceted project, which will promote healthier masculinities, healthy relationships and work towards preventing gender based violence on the UBC Vancouver campus.

The projects goal is to eradicate the damaging stereotypes that society teaches men about what it means to be masculine, and to encourage the campus community to get involved in creating a safer, caring community. The program is recruiting male identified students on campus to become leaders, to take ownership of new projects to enact culture change on campus. We will be hosting several events in the upcoming month where you can hear more about the program, and how you can be involved!

For more information on the events and how to be a part of this program, go to our website: www.amssasc.ca

Recipients: Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Undergraduate Students Association (GSJUSA)

Description: The F Word Conference showcases student research and community collaboration across activist and academic disciplines. The conference provides a venue for feminist scholars, students, and community members to learn each other’s skills, knowledge, and experiences. The conference was held in May 2015.

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/F-Word-Conference-2014/132511123596164?sk=timeline wordpress: https://grsjconference.wordpress.com/

Recipients: First Nations Studies Students Association (FNSSA)

Description: In response to the lack of inclusive cultural celebrations at UBC, members from the Indigenous Students Association (InSA) and the First Nations Studies Students Association (FNSSA) collaborated to host UBC’s first pow-wow in April 2015.

The 2nd Annual Nehiyopasquaitsimowan Powwow at UBC takes place on March 26, 2016 at the UBC AMS Nest, 6133 University Blvd Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1.

Recipients: UBC School of Social Work

Description: The School of Social Work is currently engaged in the implementation of a comprehensive and progressive Educational Equity and Diversity Strategic Plan.

Recipients: Student Radio Society of UBC and CiTR 101.9 FM

Description: The objective of this project is to improve the overall diversity of CiTR’s membership and programming in the areas of Indigenous programming, women’s programming and programming for and by those with disabilities. Radio content will be broadcast on air and available online.

Recipients: UBC Stem Cell Club, UBC Faculty of Medicine

Warren Fingrut, McKyla McIntyre, Cassandra DeLuka of OneMatch, and Adam Pankalla at the "May the Swab Be With You" Stem Cell Drive" at UBC SUB, April 2012.

Description: Patients with blood cancers may require a stem cell transplant as part of their treatment. However, 80% of patients do not have a suitable match in their family, and must find an unrelated donor. Canada’s stem cell donor-database is used to match potential donors to patients. Individuals age 17-35 can register to join this database at stem cell drives, where they swab their cheeks to provide a tissue sample for a DNA test. Finding a match for transplant is difficult – especially for non-Caucasians, who are underrepresented on Canada’s donor-database.

In 2011, we founded the Stem Cell Club, aiming to improve equity in access to stem cell donors. To date, we have coordinated dozens of stem cell drives at campuses across British Columbia, and recruited over 3200 potential stem cell donors (representing 1% of donors on Canada’s donor-database). Our team specifically targets recruitment of ethnically-diverse donors, including Aboriginal Peoples (50% of the donors we register are non-Caucasian). Our initiative increases the chances for patients from these ethnic groups to find a suitable genetic match for stem cell transplant. Our drives establish informal learning spaces on campus, where students educate other students about the need for stem cell donors from all ethnicities.

They are hosting a number of stem cell drives planned for Fall 2015, during which they hope to recruit students from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds to improve ethnic diversity on Canada's Stem Cell Donor Database. Events take place on October 13, October 21, and November 9. All events take place at the NEST by Agora Cafe, and will run from 10:30am-5pm

Visit their website at www.stemcellclub.ca
Facebook.com/UBCBloodClub
Twitter.com/UBCBlood4Life
Instagram.com/UBCBloodForLife

Recipients: Indigenous Students Association (InSA)

Description: The Indigenous Students Association (InSA) is excited to begin an innovative Indigenous Sharing Series held on the UBC Vancouver Campus. This Indigenous Sharing Series will be held throughout the 2015-2016 school year to celebrate Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history while engaging the UBC and Vancouver community in a productive and supportive relationship to discuss Indigenous topics. The Indigenous Sharing Series will host a variety of speakers including Elders, Knowledge Keepers, local activists, business and community leaders that can share what they have learned about culture, diversity, strength and resilience of Indigenous peoples. The goals of this Sharing Series are to promote community involvement and bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together. It will promote understanding of Indigenous culture, knowledge, ways of knowing as well create a space for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to learn from each other.

The Sharing Series is a free event and all are welcome to attend. Light snacks and refreshments will be provided at each event. Dates, times, and guest speakers all to be announced at a later date. Many of the events will be held at the First Nations Longhouse on the UBC campus. We would like to acknowledge that these events will be taking place on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people and we thank them for allowing us to do so.

Please follow the Indigenous Student Association facebook page to stay updated on this Sharing Series and we look forward to learning and sharing with you.

Recipients: Faculty of Education, Department of Language and Literacy Education

(Artwork: Something Mother Said About Snakes by Afuwa)

Description: Annette Henry from UBC’s Department of Language and Literacy is organizing an exciting series of forums with renowned Black Canadian scholars in 2015-16. Race Literacies: A Black Canadian Scholars’ Series will feature two scholars engaging in a dialogue with each other and with the audience about their work and issues of race and social justice. After each forum there will be opportunities for small group discussions with students regarding curriculum and research in Canadian Black Studies.

The series launches on November 12 with an afternoon and evening event. Christina Sharpe, Associate professor at Tufts University will speak at 2 pm at St. Johns College, UBC Vancouver. The evening event—the official launch of the series— features poet and novelist Dionne Brand and novelist and critic David Chariandy in conversation at SFU’s Beedie School of Business in downtown Vancouver at 7:00 PM. Both of these events are co-sponsored by UBC and SFU.

To RSVP for these events: bit.do/RaceLiteracies

Annette Henry said “We hope this series will promote new teaching and research relationships with UBC/SFU professors interested in teaching/learning and researching in the area of Black studies as well as a transforming disciplinary knowledge. There is exciting research being done that is rarely included in the curriculum. The curriculum we share with students is important for them to understand themselves, their communities and society from informed perspectives.”

Upcoming events in the Race Literacies series:

January 2015: Rinaldo Walcott (Director, Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto) and Katherine McKittrick (Women’s Studies and Geography, Queens University)

March 2015: Malinda Smith (Political Science, University of Alberta) and David Austin Humanities, Philosophy and Religion, John Abbott College)

May 2015: UBC Black scholars Denise Ferreira da Silva, Phanuel Antwi and Handel Wright and Annette Henry will present a forum.

Race Literacies: A Black Canadian Speakers Series is funded by a UBC Equity Enhancement Grant and co-sponsored by the English Department at Simon Fraser University. Other UBC sponsors include the Department of Language and Literacy Education, the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice and the Jane Rule Endowment for the Study of Human Relationships.

Recipients: UBC Learning Exchange

Description: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) is more frequently spoken about as a place of fear and hopelessness, rather than a place of resilience, hope and creativity. Perspective and Strength aims to help the UBC community better understand the strengths and opportunities, as well as the problems of social inequity facing communities like the DTES, along with efforts underway to deal with these issues. As a place-based initiative with established programs, the UBC Learning Exchange is uniquely positioned to lead the development of curricula and educational materials that orient faculty and students to the assets and challenges of the DTES.

The project aims to equip UBC faculty, staff and students with learning materials that can be flexibly incorporated into existing curricula and programs. The materials will be designed with input from DTES residents who, as experts with lived experience, will help put a human face to an often misunderstood

Recipients: Human Resources, Sauder School of Business, and the Equity and Inclusion Office

Description: This project will enhance UBC’s reputation as an equitable employer by providing training and developing resources that specifically address issues faced by trans* and gender variant staff, students, and faculty to help create a more inclusive and welcoming campus.

Recipients: Health, Wellbeing and Benefits, Human Resources

Description: Currently, one in three Canadians will experience a mental health problem at some point in their life, and one in five will experience this problem each year. Despite the prevalence of mental health issues, those struggling with mental illness are an often misunderstood, under-supported and part of a stigmatized population. By educating the UBC staff and faculty community and increasing our collective mental health literacy, we can positively impact the capacity for holding caring conversations and providing supportive resources to students and colleagues.

This program will provide key tools and skills to enhance staff and faculty effectiveness in the workplace which will contribute to creating and maintaining respectful and inclusive work environments where staff feel equipped to be productive in their work. This course will also contribute to raising the collective consciousness around mental health on campus, allowing community members to feel safe and recognized.

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) is an internationally recognized and evidence-based training program that has been adopted and adapted by the Mental Health Commission of Canada with facilitation support from the Canadian Mental Health Association. MHFA teaches first aid skills (similar to physical first aid in CPR) to cope with and assist someone in the event of a mental health crisis or challenge.

The goal of this project is to offer work-group-based training in MHFA to specific departments, units and employee groups on campus, particularly to staff groups working closely with students. By providing the training at no cost, and within specific departments or work-groups, that we can significantly reduce the barriers to participation.

This training will contribute to creating an outstanding and respectful work environment while fostering understanding and equitable treatment of those experiencing and living with mental illness. It will also ensure that staff and faculty feel supported and more equipped in their jobs to handle sensitive and challenging situations that may arise. The learnings gained through the training will help in creating a campus culture where those with mental health challenges feel represented, valued and respected. The hope is that it will also encourage and inspire those with a personal connection to mental illness to attend and participate, while also demonstrating institutional support to staff, students and faculty for increased mental health education and support at UBC.

Recipients: Equity Committee, Department of Medicine in partnership with the Department of Surgery

Description: The project will include a series of workshops to increase awareness of unconscious bias amongst faculty and trainees in the Departments of Medicine and Surgery. By teaching faculty and trainees to recognize unconscious bias they will have the tools and strategies to mitigate the effects of unconscious bias in their careers and in their delivery of healthcare.

Recipients: Faculty of Arts, International Student Development, and Enrollment Services

Description: The World University Service of Canada (WUSC) is a non-profit development and education agency with student-led local committees across Canada. WUSC-UBC is one of the university’s oldest student clubs. WUSC-UBC sponsored and re-settled its first student refugee in 1981 on a shoestring budget. Since then, UBC students have voted overwhelmingly to fund the Student Refugee Program (SRP) through student AMS fees. Through this program, student refugees have gone on to work in the non-profit, government, and business sectors. As well as, continued their education in areas like medicine and law. The “From Camps to Coast” project is an opportunity to share the impact and legacy of this exceptional program through public lectures and student-led workshops.

Current UBC SRP scholars and other WUSC sponsored scholars from around BC will be invited to an intensive training weekend. Where, they will be trained in public speaking and in developing interactive workshops to be delivered at UBC and around the province. The aims of these workshops are to enhance local understanding of the experiences of refugee students through firsthand accounts of re-settlement, the role of education in promoting a more equitable world, and to promote access to education for all, regardless of life circumstances.

Recipients: UBC Hua Dialogue student group

Description: Their vision is to provide various kinds of events and platforms for students to discuss issues related to Chinese communities in a respectful manner. The dialogues are organized and targeted to students from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Canada but are open to all UBC community members.

Recipients: Indigenous Student Association

Description: In partnership with UBC and the Alternator Gallery they will host an Indigenous Art Week aimed at providing an accessible platform for dialogue among audience members of all backgrounds. The primary objective of the event is to facilitate cross-cultural healing, cognitive decolonization, and an overall appreciation for Indigenous artistic expression.

Recipients: Department of Creative Studies

Description: The project will bring together established Indigenous artists from across the country to meet and work with local Okanagan artists and Elders to present new work, develop collaborations, and integrate Indigenous methodologies around art and daily process into the fabric of UBC Okanagan and the Kelowna community at large.

Recipients: UBC Student Union of the Okanagan and the National Association of Disabled Students (NEADS)

Description: This one-day workshop will be held in collaboration with NEADS (National Educational Association of Disabled Students) and will include speakers and student workshops. The purpose of the event is to engage students with disabilities and develop student leadership skills to create ambassadors for disability awareness and inclusion practices on campus and in the community.

Recipients: International Programs & Services, Health and Wellness

Description: UBC strives to support the whole student, recognizing the interconnectedness of students’ academic and nonacademic lives. The existing Multi-Faith Space provides students with a private, neutral space for prayer and spiritual expression that is inclusive of the rich diversity within our campus community. However, practical improvements will make the existing Multi-Faith Space more amenable to student needs – which is exactly what this project aims to achieve.

Recipients: Faculty of Health and Social Development, School of Nursing and School of Social Work; Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies; and Gender and Women’s Studies, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences

Description: The purpose of the project is to develop a peer-driven community-based project that builds spaces for greater inclusion of queer, racialized, and Indigenous students. A multidisciplinary team will partner with campus groups to organize a symposium and provide training and mentorship to students to support them in carrying out outreach with youth in the wider community.

The B.U.I.L.D. club hosted a Charity Free-Throw contest with five Special Olympics athletes during a Thunderbirds Women’s Basketball game on February 15, 2014

Recipients: School of Kinesiology - Rachel Brodeur, Rhiannon Evans, Kimberley Jung and Emily Ryan

Description: The objective of B.U.I.L.D club will promote involvement in the Special Olympics Canada Summer Games (July 8-12, 2014) and increase awareness of intellectual disabilities amongst students, staff and the University community. They will work to build sustainable relationships with intellectual disability organizations and members of the UBC community.

Read KIN Students Help B.U.I.L.D. Relationships Between People with Intellectual Disabilities and the UBC Community.

The 5th Annual F-Word Conference was held on May 3, 2014. Photos by Toni Latour

Recipients: Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Undergraduate Students Association (GSJUSA) - Meghan McCabe, Krystal Valentine and Caity Goerke

Description: The F Word Conference is a unique, student-run event that fosters the research of undergraduate students interested in feminist thought, as well as feminist scholarship and activism more broadly. It aims to raise awareness about a range of important issues, including but not limited to indigenous studies, queer theory, fat-positivity, anti-racist work, decolonizing methodologies and their intersections with feminisms, social justice, and sexual assault. The 5th Annual F Word undergraduate conference with the theme "Fostering feminist communities and scholarship" was held on May 3, 2014.

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/F-Word-Conference-2014/132511123596164?sk=timeline wordpress: https://grsjconference.wordpress.com/

Recipients: Indigenous Student Association at UBC - Rebecca Doughty and Salia Joseph

Description: The First Nations Studies Student Association (FNSSA) and Indigenous Students Association (InSA) are proud to announce the Nehiyo-paskwa-itsimowin Pow-wow Celebration! This will be UBC’s first annual Pow-wow celebration and will be held on Saturday, April 4th from 12:00pm-11:00pm at the War Memorial Gym on the UBC Vancouver Campus. The goal of the Nehiyo-paskwa-itsimowin Pow-wow is to honour and celebrate Cree pow-wow traditions, and is an effort to educate the general public about the diversity of Indigenous cultures. Pow-wow is a traditional Cree celebration about life, dance and song, and this event is an opportunity for Aboriginal Peoples to celebrate this culture, while also offering the chance for non-native people to learn and be a part of the pow-wow experience!

The details of the event can be accessed online through Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/events/813936192011446/.

Knowing the Land beneath our feet logo was designed by Kathy Lea Moyou from UBC Arts ISIT.

Recipients: First Nations Studies Program - Dr. Daniel Heath Justice, Spencer Lindsay and Sarah Ling

Description: UBC Vancouver is rich in Indigenous history and presence, but for many students, faculty, staff, and visitors, this history and presence is invisible. Many of the Indigenous names, artwork, and architecture across campus denote important relationships between campus units and local First Nations, and all provide the occasion to think about our history together in this place. They tell stories, encode values, and point the way to respectful relationships with local First Nations and to better understanding of our presence on Musqueam land.

Knowing the Land Beneath Our Feet is a multimedia initiative aimed at bringing these stories and histories to light to teach students, faculty, staff and visitors alike about their responsibility to uphold the relationships signified by these pieces. Project leads Sarah Ling and Spencer Lindsay are partnering with the First Nations Studies Program (FNSP), Coordinated Arts Program (CAP) and Aboriginal Initiatives, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology to create curriculum materials that incorporate their walking tour into sustainable lesson plans that enable students to experience what it means to be on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən’q’əmin’əm’-speaking Musqueam people. Ling and Lindsay are also creating a digital tour on a web interface developed by UBC Digital Media Technologies so that anyone can access information about the many house posts, totem poles, signs, and other sites of this tour. This initiative is supported by the 2014 UBC Equity Enhancement Fund and will be piloted with FNSP and CAP classes and user groups throughout the Spring of 2015. A public launch will follow.

Read a story in The Talon about this innovative project.

Listen to story on CBC Radio with Lisa Charlyboy

Recipients: MD Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Medicine - Ali Majdzadeh and Michael Jew

Description: The objective of this outreach program is to introduce students from low-income families, in grades 8-10, to a variety of health science programs and activities to inspire career choices in Health Sciences.

Recipients: Faculty of Education – Jan Hare and Jo-ann Archibald

Description: This project aims to modify and enhance curriculum experiences in the Teacher Education program through the engagement of Indigenous knowledge holders (e.g., Elders and knowledge keepers). These knowledge keepers will mentor faculty/instructors and model for them, as well as the 680 teacher candidates in the program, the practices of Indigenous pedagogies in a range of undergraduate course settings.

Recipients: Department of Mathematics and First Nations House of Learning - Melania Alvarez and Debra Martel

Description: A five week summer internship program where aboriginal high school students will take courses in math, science and English, work with members of the university community, engage in cultural activities and learn about academic and career possibilities at UBC and beyond.

Recipients: St. John’s College (SJC) and Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) - Professor Henry Yu and Amy Perreault

Description: Where Are We in the World? (WAWW) is a collaboration between St. John’s College and Aboriginal Initiatives – Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology at UBC.

The focus of this new initiative is to provide a strong foundation experientially to answer the question of “where” we are in terms of UBC and Vancouver as places on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. As the core of this film series, viewers are invited to (re)engage with sites around the Lower Mainland shaped by often ignored or hidden histories of struggle and agency through the stories of local community members, elders, educators, activists, and historians.

The first two films are short documentaries (approx. 10-13 minutes minutes each) that feature an array of perspectives that introduce us to Vancouver’s Chinatown and the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. These stories provide us all an opportunity to critically reflect on themes of place, historical consciousness, and reciprocity.

The next film in the series will explore UBC’s location on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people.

WAWW builds upon existing initiatives that revitalize stories and foster dialogues regarding local Indigenous and Asian Canadian histories and issues. As it continues to develop and is integrated into a variety of teaching and learning spaces, the films will become the backbone of a program of site visits, dialogues, and virtual introductions to both the campus and the city that engage the UBC community and communities around the city into a sustained conversation about where they live.

To access our films, please visit this playlist on UBC’s YouTube channel.

To learn about and access relevant resources developed by members of our project development team, please visit the CTLT Aboriginal Initiatives website and the St. John’s College website.

A list of further resources developed by our partners is available here.

Alex Janvier was artist in residence at UBC Okanagan in October 2014. Photo by Paul Marck, University Relations

Recipients: Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies - Ashok Mathur

Description: The intent of this residency program is to bring together well-established Indigenous artists from across the country to present new work, develop collaborations, and integrate Indigenous methodologies around art and daily process into the fabric of UBC Okanagan and the Kelowna community at large.

Read: Alex Janvier is UBC artist-in-residence from Oct. 4 to 17

Recipients: School of Engineering - Teija Wakeman and Renee Leboe

Description: The goal of this program is to provide a platform for women to advance their skills required to be successful in their engineering careers.

Recipients: International Programs and Services - Denise Chan, Leah Sanford and Philipp Reichert

Description: The project objectives are to increase intercultural understanding, communication and competencies amongst staff, faculty and off-campus service providers who work directly with international, aboriginal and visible minority students by providing a variety of professional development opportunities.

Recipients: Disability Resource Centre - Gabriel Tobias

Description: The objective is to increase the accessibility of UBC Okanagan's current fitness facility and to connect the Human Kinetics Department with the Disability Resource Centre and the UBC Okanagan Fitness Facility to connect certified and capable trainers with individuals registered with the Disability Resource Centre.

Recipients: UBCO Aboriginal Programs and Services - Sandra Young and Dan Odenbach

Description: yr'kstmncutəlz "Around the Circle" provides a tangible approach to incorporating Indigenous culture, practices and teaching into campus operations as a means to support and advance Intercultural understanding at UBC Okanagan's campus.

Recipient: Faculty of Education

The objective of this joint partnership is to engage the Aboriginal community in formalizing concepts for working with Indigenous knowledge and utilizing learning pedagogies in order to assist instructors in their teaching practice and methods.

Recipients: Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy

The overall objective of this multi-phase project is to facilitate the creation of an inclusive UBC campus for students with disabilities in the health and human service professional programs. The objective of the first phase (current application) is to better understand the barriers and facilitators for students with disabilities in the health and human service professional programs and identify initial educational strategies and resources to better support students with disabilities.

Recipients: School of Social Work

The goal of this project, approved by the School Council, is to develop a comprehensive and progressive educational equity policy and plan for the School that addresses employment, student recruitment and admission, teaching and learning.

Recipients: Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and The First Nations House of Learning

This project is designed to meet the objectives of the Aboriginal Strategic plan, in particular, the goal of engaging with Aboriginal students at a younger age. An immediate benefit will be an increase in secondary completion and post-secondary awareness and comfort for Aboriginal youth.

Recipients: Life Sciences Institute - Graduate Student Association (LSI-GSA)

Description: The objective of this outreach program is to provide secondary school students, in particular students from rural areas of British Columbia, and students from schools with large aboriginal populations, with hands-on laboratory experience, career information and answers to questions about science, in order to inspire educational and career choices in life sciences research and related fields.

Recipients: Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology

Description: The timeline - Time and Place at UBC: Our Histories and Relations - documents UBC’s key historical moments with Aboriginal peoples, while locating these moments in broader contexts at institutional, provincial, and national levels (i.e., UBC, BC, and Canada). Although the special focus of the timeline is on Aboriginal peoples, it is not only about them, nor is it only about the past. Rather, the timeline intends to speak to us all – Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples alike at UBC – to build a shared understanding of the specificities and complexity of the time and place that we share today.
Specifically, the timeline aims to:
1) develop our awareness of the history of this place at UBC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people; and
2) offer a historical lens through which we reflect on our relations at UBC by allowing us to embed ourselves in the multiple historical layers of this place.