Office of Diversity and Inclusion
The Office of Diversity and Inclusion collaborates to build an inclusive community that welcomes and supports people with a wide range of experiences, cultures, identities, and perspectives.
Kresge Building
677 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA 02115
Building a community of inclusive excellence
We recognize the vital importance of drawing on a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and skills to solve the urgent challenges facing our society. We integrate our commitment to an inclusive and pluralistic community into every facet of School life.
The Office of Diversity and Inclusion collaborates across the School to:
- Recruit and retain a diverse community of students, staff, and academic appointees — diverse across every dimension, including diversity of ideas, perspectives, and lived experiences.
- Nurture a culture of inclusion and belonging, where every individual is respected and valued.
- Build capacity for dialogue across differences.
- Support historically marginalized members of our community.
- Address issues that negatively impact members of our community, which may include structural, institutional, and interpersonal biases.
- Work with the community outside our campus on initiatives to improve health and advance equity in Boston and around the world.
- Promptly address complaints of discrimination, bias, or harassment.
Our office undertakes many initiatives each year, including:
- Collaboration with academic departments to support strategies for nurturing inclusive and pluralistic communities, diverse across every dimension.
- Professional development, including leadership workshops.
- Regular convenings of our Bias Response Team.
- Learning programs to help community leaders across Boston implement a public health lens into their organizational activities.
- Summer research programs intended to introduce undergraduate students to the public health profession and research.
- Unconscious bias training for student application reviewers, faculty search committees, and staff hiring managers.
- Annual Yerby and Hopkins lectures to raise awareness of public health issues among historically marginalized populations.
- The Dean’s Advisory Committee for Diversity and Inclusion, which includes members from across the School.
- The LGBTQIA+ Working Group, a collective of students, staff, and faculty who aim to advise School leadership on supporting the needs of LGBTQIA+ identified members of the Harvard Chan School community.
- The Health Equity and Leadership Conference, a student-led initiative sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
- Engagement with Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery report, including multiple community forums to grapple with the report’s findings and approaches to engaging with Black and Indigenous descendant communities.
Together with our community, we have laid out three active principles for our work:
Stride forward courageously
- We will promote opportunities for all community members to learn and grow, gaining the capacity for constructive communication across differences as well as the skills to address barriers and biases that may divide or marginalize us.
- We will nurture in community members the lifelong commitment to promote pluralism, inclusion, belonging, and diversity across many dimensions in both their personal and professional endeavors.
Actively foster a culture of belonging
- We commit to understanding contemporary injustice in the context of its historical origins, which include legacies of indigenous exploitation, slavery, gender discrimination, religious discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and colonialism.
- We actively denounce all forms of oppression and discrimination and the harms perpetuated by such practices at individual, institutional, and structural levels.
Commit to excellence in scientific and academic pursuits
- We will cultivate an environment where students from all backgrounds and identities, and with a diversity of perspectives and ideas, are valued, affirmed, and supported in their educational and scholarly pursuits.
- We commit to championing equity in our pedagogical and research practices to increase opportunities for inclusive scholarship, thought leadership, and public health practice and to address bias and oppression—such as racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and marginalization—as global public health imperatives.
Learn about Harvard Chan School's mission
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