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ODEI Points of Contact

Video Title:

Dr. John-Paul Chaisson-Cardenas Vice President, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Welcome Message 2024

Visual Description:

Dr. John-paul Chaisson-Cardenas speaks directly to camera. He is wearing glasses and has a navy blue shirt on. The background is light blue.

Transcript:

Greetings faculty, staff, students of CT State. Welcome back.

Over the last year,the staff within the office of DEI at CT State, we have adopted an informal model. We are now the founders of an institution that will outlive us. Let us make it something special. A place where students, faculty and staff feel like they belong.

It is in that vein that the inaugural year of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion at CT State has been one of growth and one of connection. It was this year that we have partnered
with so many staff, faculty and administrators across our 12 campuses in order to come together
and lay the foundation for a meaningful, innovative DEI program at our institution.

In this way, we truly are founders of this new community college, CT State, with all the responsibilities and opportunities this role engenders.

I can assure you that we at the DEI office took this work seriously, and we have been thoughtful and deliberate about each step and layer of the work that we will be doing henceforth.

For example, throughout this year we set up and staffed this distinct office's focus on equity and civil rights, disability and accessibility services and campus climate.

It was important to me and to the rest of our team that we start with compliance. We want to start with deep compliance with the State and Federal law, as well as CSCU policy, because these laws and policies help us as a community delineate the minimum, acceptable behavior at our institution by placing behaviors such as bullying, discrimination, harassment, and retaliation outside of the acceptable boundaries of our new organization.

These guardrails are now in place and are part of our ethical and structural foundation.
To reinforce these boundaries however, we have begun this year by retraining administrators and senior staff from across the system to ensure we are aligned and consistent throughout all our 12 campuses.

However, it is also important to note that while we never stop working on compliance for CT State, CT State DEI is much more than a compliance effort. To us, it is also a positive set of supports, a support system towards moving and engaging and implementing of support programs and practices that contribute to a sense of belonging for all our students and employees at CT State. Thus, we have embarked on a data informed process to understand where our systemic and cultural gaps are.

This process began in spring 2024 with the implementation of our first systemwide Campus Climate survey, which was designed to get feedback directly from our students, faculty and staff on their perceptions and experiences related to their sense of belonging at and inclusion at CT State. This participatory effort will continue to grow this fall, when each campus will digest, analyze and work from this and other sets of data, including the achievement gap
and what I like to call the opportunity gap data and civil rights investigation data.

To think broadly and creatively about how we will respond to the equity gaps, the cultural gaps
that we have at CT State. We want to work on these things systemically and deliberately.

I want to thank all of you staff, faculty, administrators and students who continue and continue to work with us to contribute to these programs and practices, which we have now highlighted in the annual report that should be linked below this video.

This is because no one person or office owns the DEI work at CT State.

It is the responsibility of all of us from each of our organizational vantage points to do this work. It is not something different than our mission and our work. Overall DEI, it's not something you do in addition. It is really at the center of our work for our students.

And only together can we create the type of environment and institution we all want to learn at, we all want to teach at and we all want to work at.

I leave this past year energized and hopeful about the work ahead. I know that we have a caring, competent, and dedicated group of administrators, faculty and staff who each day dedicate their lives and work to serving our students. It is within that cultural context that we want to take the next step and really figure out how to support each one of the groups that we've mentioned before, to feel like they belong here. That CT State is their academic home.

And so have a wonderful year. I look forward to seeing you in the hallways of each one of our campuses. And don't forget, you are the center of DEI work at CT State.