This plan is a proposal for a more transparent and community oriented plan towards racial justice at Smith. As I am limited by only the injustices that I see, I would love feedback on ways to make this more inclusive! I welcome all feedback and suggestions on either the forum page or down below!
The image above is a mock up of what the Towards Racial Justice plan would look like with some of the suggestions made in this transparency model.
The Smith administration needs to create a transparent system easily accessible to the Smith community, to serve as a tool for checking on administration progress and actions.
Key Needs
When a task was requested, and when the task was started
What process is happening
Who is involved, with links to their contact information
Ability to submit comments both as the original poster and as community members
We envision something like the Towards Racial Justice Plan, but instead of allowing administration to choose the benchmarks of progress, the community would raise concerns or goal they would like met and Administrators would build a plan to try to meet them.
These demands and corresponding actions would be banked on the Smith website, which would require a Smith log on to view in order to keep this information within the Smith system. If viewing the extended demands system required a Smith log in, it would be important to ensure that all Smith employees have a Smith log in.
This system would be an institutionally transparent way for people to raise issues for change and get regular updates.
Format wise, I envision a combination between the Towards Racial justice plan expanded to include the request format of Teamworks Live, which would allow the user to select the building on campus where this occurred, select multiple staff/faculty/administrators who might be able to help with the solution, or might be interested in the incident/demand. This ability to tag locations is important for highlighting accessibility demands as well, and this could also be a way to tag access buttons that don’t work, lack of elevators, etc.
It would also have an option to select from accurate lists of departments/programs at Smith that the request might pertain to.
From the Towards Racial justice plan, this model should retain the Initiative Area, Action Item, Campus Partner and Status update format, which allows administration to update the community on the progress of task, but in more depth than the current model which is either: in progress or done. Beyond expanding transparency of the various stages a project was in, it is also important for this system to track when the request was placed, and when each stage of the project was initiated to keep the the timeline transparent and to hold everyone accountable. Part of this increase in transparency will be expanded updates on these requests at regular intervals, similar to community addresses from the President, and the CIRT emails, which should include not only as place to add commentary on the process online, which can be referenced during administrative meetings, but also listing about if the meetings where this is being discussed are public and people can voice their opinions in person. Multiple avenues for the Smith community to submit commentary and thoughts on action items would be essential, as our community has a wealth of experience, and one failing that administration constantly runs into is the lack of diverse experiences on an administrative level which means their proposed solutions often have holes which would have been easily identifiable to a marginalized community member.
Such a system could create opportunities for clearer dialogue between students and administration. If created, the formation of this system should itself be a collaborative process between Smith community and administration. Students, staff and faculty involved in the process would need to be compensated for their labor in this collaboration, as often BIPOC and marginalized students are asked to speak on panels, advocate for themselves and others in lieu of hiring diverse administration and staff to facilitate this. This need for compensation extends to BIPOC staff who are routinely asked to act as mediators for incidents involving racism.
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