Inclusive Campus Initiative

The Inclusive Campus Initiative (ICI) is an innovative and strategic ground-up approach that organically unites campus partners who dedicate time beyond their formal roles or departmental affiliations to advance the work within an inclusive campus ecosystem. This collective movement that galvanizes collaboration breaks down silos and inspires campus partners to come together through a shared vision of inclusion. 

Further, the ICI strives to break the, often invisible, barriers of student access to administrators, charting a path to transparency, understanding, and ultimately, community. Through this method, students have a through line for direct problem solving, community forums or just a listening ear necessary to genuinely feel a sense of belonging as a Spartan. While many of our campus community concerns are complex, often without an easy resolution, the uniqueness of the ICI is in offering students and community members a space where all can be vital contributors in the process of creating a more inclusive campus. 

The ICI hosts several opportunities for community to come together such as:

• Campus Community Breakfasts
• Annual Inclusive Impact Conference
• Community Learning Forums
• Inclusive training and workshops

The Inclusive Campus Initiative reports to the Office of the Executive Vice President for Administration (EVPA) and is sponsored by Residential and Hospitality Services (RHS). The ICI is led by Project Director Meaghan Kozar, Ph.D., who works alongside the ICI Leadership Advisory Team, the ICI Student Leadership Advisory Team and many campus partners at Michigan State University.

The Inclusive Campus Initiative is open to all without preference or restriction based on personal protected identity. Explore campus opportunities that foster connect and belonging, managed by the Inclusive Campus Initiative:

The Ground Beneath Us: What Holds Us When Everything Shifts

Theme Description and Guiding Questions:
We are living through another season of disruption. Institutions are evolving. Leadership is transitioning. The conditions that once felt stable, in our organizations, our communities, our country, our world, are in constant flux. And yet, we show up. We tend to our work. We find each other.

The Ground Beneath Us: What Holds Us When Everything Shifts guides us to where the ground still holds, helping us better weather our storms. Rooted in the practices of art, community and healing, this gathering moves through three arcs: roots, practice, and power. We begin by asking where we come from. We then move into the work of tending—to ourselves, to one another, and to our communities. Finally, we close with a question about where we are going and what grounded, healing communities can grow together.

In a garden, the ground holds when it has been tended- nourished, rested, cared for over time. Farmers have a word for this kind of rest: fallow. Ground left unplanted for a season recovers what it has given. And yet we almost never let ourselves go fallow in this work. Depleted ground cannot hold what gets planted in it, no matter how good the seeds are.

We ask:

• What have you been rooted in and what has made it hard to stay there? What survival strategies have you had to carry just to remain in spaces that were never fully built for you?
   
• For some of us, the ground has never been stable. What does it mean to build belonging on stolen land, on colonized ground, on places that were never meant to hold us?
   
• What does stable ground mean for those that have come here seeking safety, survival and new beginnings?
   
• Introspection and community building are not separate practices: you go inward to show up outward, and you show up outward and it changes what you find within. What does it look like to do both at once- to materialize community through art, music, and poetry while doing the internal work that brings you home to yourself?
   
• Communities have always been the ones holding institutions together while simultaneously questioning and dismantling unjust and oppressive systems. What does it mean to tend that ground, and to sustain the people doing that invisible labor without losing ourselves in the process?
   
• What does it mean to be healing and feel powerful through various individual and collective practices? How do grounded communities move and expand?