Dear IHP community members,

I want to welcome you back to the spring semester and wish you all a happy and healthy new year. As we enter the seventh semester of this pandemic, I continue to be amazed at the commitment the faculty and staff have made to providing a world-class health professions education and supporting the IHP community. Our students have remained diligent in their studies and resilient as their academic programs have responded to the changes in health care during this pandemic. These are not easy times, but your ongoing dedication to your disciplines has been inspirational. I hope that our current surge is short lived and that you each have a wonderful spring semester.

On January 17, we will be celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In the spirit of how Dr. King lived his life, the day offers a moment of reflection on one’s role in society and service to those in our communities. It is a time to recommit ourselves to the work of striving for a more just society. I hope many of you will take this day as a time to provide service to others and reflect on the small steps we can all take toward social justice.

The IHP has been working to address the issues of social justice, equity, and belonging in our community. While we committed to that journey many years ago, we have intensified our approach over the last several years with the addition of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Office to organize and support this work being done by all of us. I wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our efforts.

In the summer of 2020, as we were processing the murder of George Floyd, we committed to six initiatives aimed at addressing some of the inequities that we were seeing in our community. As a result of that work, we:

  • Developed and shared widely our IHP Commitment to Equity and Anti-oppression,
  • Identified new ways to support our BIPOC faculty, staff, and alumni with employee resource groups,
  • Began work on developing an Alumni of Color Network,
  • Developed policies supporting release time for invisible labor provided by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty, 
  • Facilitated specialized training programs and workshops for administration, faculty, staff, and students, and
  • Launched a new bias reporting mechanism for students that has both an anonymous and non-anonymous reporting option.  

Also, the IHP rejoined a consortium of colleges and universities, called Bridgewater State University (BSU) Leading for Change Racial Equity and Justice Institute (REJI), whose purpose is to help universities identify those areas on their campus that could be modified to create a more inclusive community. A group of faculty and staff, focused on developing racial justice initiatives, in the summer of 2021 shared goals and plans to address these initiatives with the JEDI Council and administration. View the full list of efforts underway to support faculty, staff and students in these areas.

And, to assure equity in recruitment of administrators and faculty, we have added an equity advocate to each search committee whose role is to help identify and make visible implicit and unconscious bias in the recruitment process. The JEDI Office is also engaged with Enrollment Services in several projects that focus on increasing the number of underrepresented minority students at the IHP.

It is critically important to remember that each of us has ownership and responsibility for the JEDI work that needs to be done at the IHP. While the JEDI Office leads us with expert knowledge and facilitation, each of us is responsible for creating our IHP community. We will be responsive to our external environment but work with intention toward the goals we have defined and set for ourselves through our anti-oppression framework. We know this is just the beginning of our journey and we are committed to continuing this work in the years to come.

Dr. King often said that “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” In so many ways, I feel like we are on the first or second step of our staircase. We don’t know what the whole staircase looks like and we have to take these first few steps to move to the next steps, but we have faith that the staircase is there, and it will lead us to our destination if we persist.

Again, I wish you a happy and healthy new year and I look forward to joining together over the course of this semester, as a community, to celebrate our collective commitment to all of our goals for 2022.

With warm regards,

Paula