Ensuring Everyone has an Opportunity to Engage and Thrive at UREC
As part of our strategic plan, UREC aims to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to engage and thrive. We have implemented the following strategies in an effort to work on representation, outreach, education, and access.
- Connect with, design with, and invite underrepresented groups
- Celebrate different populations with intentional programs, communication, and co-sponsored events
- Challenge cultural norms to explore change. Update policies and standards of operations
- Design with everyone in mind
- Reduce barriers & intimidation
- Speak students' “language”
- Recruit and hire with the focused intent of representing the App State Community
- Redesigned and improved Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training that is easier to access and track completion
This past year, we have continued our efforts in offering new experiences to allow all students to experience what people with different motor abilities experience. Through the grants offered through the Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Committee, UREC has been able to offer these opportunities:
- GoalBall
- Adaptive Climbing
- Adaptive Fitness Upper Body Exerciser - coming summer 2022!
In an effort to let our campus community know about different events and initiatives we are taking, a team of students led our initiative to create our Mountaineers Belong website as a platform to open safe spaces to students. The website specifically provides information about UREC’s commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.
We are committed to working with our student staff to educate them about our different initiatives and how their work can contribute to creating spaces for everyone to engage and thrive. These metrics display that we are continuously working on all of our equity, diversity, and inclusion objectives.
- 93% of student staff reported that they “strongly agree” or “agree” that diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to perform their job at the UREC successfully
- 80% of participants reported “strongly agree” or “agree” in feeling welcomed and supported during their experience at UREC.
- 91.6% increase of unique users overall at UREC - (Comparing Fall 20-Spring 21 to Fall 21-Spring 22)
We are excited to continue to explore data to help us better understand how our department is working towards our objectives. We are actively working with the Student Affairs Office to capture the student staff and student participants’ demographic data that will allow us to intentionally work on the staff representation and the outreach of underrepresented groups. This data will enable us to identify which populations are participating at UREC and which populations are not. Overall, we look forward to continuing to make connections, designing programs and offerings, and inviting underrepresented groups to participate with us at UREC.