Q. What strategy has helped your team stay ahead of the needs of the Black community on campus?
We have made a huge shift in our approach and our mentality around how to thrive. Last summer, we embarked upon a project called “What If we thrive?” focused on making sure that we center well-being in everything that we do, starting with those of us in The Village.
We defined what our holistic well-being looks like and how we hold each other accountable and support each other. This fall has probably been our best semester ever, because not only were we focusing on well-being, we were proactive about everything that we took on. We always want to say yes to everything, which can spread us so thin that it can make it challenging to actually meet our initial goals. We created healthy boundaries and made conscious choices about what we were and were not going to engage in this year and that helped balance out our work and enable us to make a greater impact on the student community.
I'm really proud of The Village taking this approach. Now we've seen the students who watched us model that take time for their own well-being, and we have a lot of conversations about making healthy choices in all areas of our lives. Our students are infusing that into leadership, into classes, into their programs. As a result, the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center is thriving because students are super excited about what they're doing. We created the capacity for them to focus on the thing they're most passionate about, and to consider what are all the things they may be carrying and how to find balance.
This proactive approach has led to the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center booming, to the point where we're growing out of the space. We no longer have enough space to do all that we need to do. It’s a good problem to have, but it's still a big challenge.
Q. Where do you see The Village growing in the coming years?
The Village will probably double or triple in size in the coming years, and that's because right now we are in a time of engagement with partnership across campus. We're trying to shift the narrative of thriving to include the whole campus community and help people understand that in order for us to thrive, everyone has to be on board, not just leadership staff. Within The VIllage programming, we are creating navigational capacity and resources for students so that we can prepare them for Berkeley, but the things that they encounter across campus are harder for us to control. We partner across campus with people who have similar goals, and we hope to see a larger campus-wide plan for thriving students. It is imperative to create alignment across efforts already happening on campus and to create conditions for people to thrive by adding more people to the work, not adding more work to the people.
Some exciting new projects include a Black Wednesday Wall, and a Black Public Arts project fundraising in order to place art installations to celebrate Black history on campus. The goal is to create a comprehensive and impactful celebration of Black history and culture on campus.