Pulling in the Same Direction

Action Steps

• Enhance outreach and recruitment processes employing targeted practices to attract diverse student populations, monitoring the impact of competitive financial packages to increase enrollment of accepted undergraduate and graduate students.
• Increase institutional support to ensure the success of all students, such as students from under-resourced or nontraditional backgrounds, and those facing other academic or social challenges.
• Identify and reduce equity gaps, such as time to degree disparities and metrics of post-baccalaureate success for low-income, first-generation, and Black, Latinx/a/o, and Native American students.
• Establish mechanisms to facilitate collaborations between staff and faculty using evidence-based practices to promote student success and reduce equity gaps.
• Build a coordinated strategy for cultivating new alliances and enhancing existing partnerships with minority-serving institutions to promote diversity in graduate student enrollment.
• Formalize processes to recruit, hire, develop, evaluate, recognize, and retain staff and administrators that promote access and equity.
• Create mechanisms to enable purposeful professional growth of all staff and develop support structures to identify and promote diversity in staff leadership.
• Ensure our faculty search and hiring processes employ evidence-based practices to promote equity, inclusion, and diversity in hiring outcomes.
• Develop mechanisms to recruit and retain a diverse faculty and engage in purposeful efforts to develop future faculty.
• Formalize mechanisms to enhance effective faculty mentoring to support all faculty members in the promotion, tenure, and advancement process, as well as develop support mechanisms to enable progression into academic leadership.

Action Steps

• Articulate diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies for students, staff, and faculty members, as well as mechanisms to enable and incentivize growth.
• Develop and expand opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage in ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion education to promote cultural humility and competency.
• Create and expand conflict resolution and conflict mediation pathways for faculty, staff, and students.
• Equip leaders to develop and sustain academic and workplace cultures that center respect, address instances of inequity, and encourage belonging by promoting an environment where all students, faculty, and staff feel welcome and valued.
• Create clearly defined and transparent inclusive leadership expectations and competencies as well as mechanisms for ongoing self-reflection and incentives for growth.
• Utilize performance management to recognize inclusive leadership as a necessary competency of supervisors at all levels and champion professional growth related to cultural humility.

Action Steps

• Increase support and resources for instructors to advance equity in the classroom, as well as recognition of those that are leading the way.
• Review, amend, and expand curricular offerings to promote understanding of and obstacles to diversity, equity and justice; ensure visibility of existing offerings.
• Develop incentives and pathways to promote inclusive teaching, such as incorporating universal design and other culturally responsive practices.
• Encourage visiting appointments of scholars who advance institutional diversity goals in the classroom, through their research, and/or through public engagement.
• Build intellectual community through mechanisms that foster research focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.

Action Steps

• Adopt a definition of community engagement, in which reciprocity serves as a guiding principle.
• Strengthen relationships with the New Brunswick and Piscataway communities, engaging in the purposeful work of repair and relationship building to facilitate long-term mutually beneficial collaborations and establishing mechanisms to facilitate information and resource sharing.
• Develop community roundtables and other avenues to ensure that the voice of the community is heard and that its stated needs are prioritized as we seek to expand university-community partnerships.
• Leverage Rutgers’ educational mission, extending our reach throughout the state of New Jersey, the nation and the world through intentional partnerships.
• Increase civic engagement/service-learning course offerings, ensuring they are identifiable in course management software.
• Foster collaborations among curricular and co-curricular community engagement efforts.
• Expand opportunities for co-curricular community engagement, extending the notion of the beloved community beyond the university walls.
• Facilitate the centralized tracking of community engagement research and service projects to better coordinate and actively steward university-community relationships.

Action Steps

• Audit institutional policies and practices for alignment with diversity strategic priorities.
• Establish information-sharing mechanisms to facilitate transparency and data-informed decision making to support goal achievement, such as dashboards to report and track applicant pools for students, faculty, and staff.
• Strategically align efforts and organizational resources to facilitate collaboration on goals and designate responsibility for oversight to enable accountability.
• Develop and implement a strategic communications plan for diversity and inclusion that facilitates ongoing updates on how the university is working towards achieving the diversity strategic priorities and enables coordination and consistency across units in meeting this objective.
• Adopt consistent hiring, promotion, and advancement committee policies and practices across the university to further equitable outcomes.
• Identify, coordinate, and expand existing comprehensive studies that measure multiple dimensions of campus climate and engagement for students, staff, and faculty in a scholarly and rigorous manner that allows for an assessment of longitudinal changes.
• Formalize robust mechanisms for recognition and rewards (e.g., unit-specific, chancellor-led, etc.) that promotes progress toward inclusive excellence for organizational units.
• Provide an annual comprehensive update on progress made toward goals stated in the institutional diversity and inclusion plan.

• Enhance recruiting outreach that attracts diverse students and consistently monitor disaggregated data on applicants to increase enrollment of undergraduate and graduate students.
• Continue to market and fund Bridging the Gap to increase access and affordability and annually evaluate the success of the program.
• Develop holistic, data-driven, and evidence-based approaches to student success focused on improving academic success, increasing retention, decreasing time to graduation, and increasing post-graduation success for underrepresented and/or first-generation students.
  • Conduct annual assessment and update the equity scorecard, sharing progress with the campus community.
  • Expand opportunities for first-generation and underrepresented students to participate in experiential learning, both domestically and internationally.
  • Develop initiatives that specifically address equity gaps, where they exist, including for Black and Latinx/a/o students.
• Examine policies and processes that are obstacles and barriers to inclusive and equitable participation and student success.

• Develop diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) informed recruitment and onboarding practices and policies for faculty and staff that align with the university’s shared commitment to creating, retaining, and valuing a beloved community.
  • Create a manual for recruiting staff and faculty with clear expectations and resources on conducting an equitable and inclusive search process.
  • Develop and implement training for all hiring committees, with all faculty search committees attending the Committee on Insitutional Equity and Diversity Faculty Search Committee Training.
  • Continually review search processes, hiring practices and outcomes to assess progress towards increasing faculty and staff diversity.

• Institutionalize the use of diversity hiring plans that outline how departments will seek to recruit a diverse applicant pool, attend to areas of underrepresentation, and conduct an inclusive and equitable search.
• Establish a “search advocate” model in which a DEIA expert acts as a consultant to search committees and can provide advice and counsel to academic units on DEIA issues.
• Enhance assistance with hiring and visa processes for international faculty.
  • Allocate funds to recruit underrepresented faculty more effectively.
  • Connect with university-wide hiring programs to enhance recruitment of underrepresented faculty; especially consider senior scholars.
  • Demonstrate a clear commitment to the retention of underrepresented faculty. 

• Evaluate staff salary structures and polices surrounding promotions, reclassifications, and in-grade adjustments to identify and address any areas of inequity in staff salary.
• Develop opportunities and training focused on leadership development to increase staff satisfaction and retention.
• Establish clear expectations for diversity, equity, and inclusion competencies for all leadership, staff, and faculty, as well as a mechanism to enable and incentivize their professional development.
• Conduct exit interviews on faculty, staff and students who choose to leave the institution to better understand and where necessary, address challenges experienced. 
• Develop and implement process to understand campus climate and share results and plans for improvement with campus community.

• Enhance infusion of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) related content into students’ educational experiences and ensure a positive DEIA-related classroom climate for all students.
  • Implement college and department self-studies relating to diversity within the curriculum and classroom and provide resources to support addressing areas found to be in need of improvement.
  • Adjust general education requirement to require a Div (Diversity) course in the general education curriculum.
  • Develop a Faculty Fellows program that will assist faculty in developing more robust and impactful courses that meets the general education requirements for diversity.
  • Provide all faculty and teaching staff training, readings, and resources on best practices for inclusivity in the classroom.
• Provide support and mentoring for faculty, especially underrepresented and marginalized faculty, to support their advancement along the pathway of promotion, tenure, and leadership development.
• Ensure that processes relating to personnel decisions align with best practices relating to equity and inclusion.
• Value, support, and promote scholarly activities, service, teaching, and leadership that advance DEIA.
• Create and support a network of scholars and colleagues focused on DEIA to build a sense of belonging and further the advancement of scholarship and research. 
  • Provide campus and/or university support for DEIA research and intellectual engagement.
  • Enhance the campus’s reputation as a center of DEIA-related scholarship by establishing designated funds to support DEIA research and/or providing seed funding for pilot studies that lead to external DEIA-related grants.
  • Create a speaker series or consistent academic forum that highlights the work of Rutgers-Camden faculty in DEIA and provides opportunities to engage external scholars.

• Develop a local procurement initiative that targets Camden city and Camden County.
• Develop a local hiring initiative that targets Camden city residents.
• Expand current K-12 partnerships and strengthen internal collaboration of K-12 initiatives that serve Camden and local underrepresented and marginalized youth.
• Increase the number of Camden youth successfully transitioning to post-secondary institutions.
• Develop opportunities for Camden residents to audit Rutgers-Camden courses.

• Enhance community outreach approaches that provide opportunities for residents and community stakeholders to inform campus-based civic and community engagement initiatives.
  • Develop community advisory board and establish bi-monthly community stakeholder meetings.
• Review current policies and procedures governing community usage of Rutgers facilities and better communicate policies and facilitate community access to campus space.

• Establish Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Center.
• Implement the recommendations of the Committee on Public Art and History: Representing Equity, Diversity, and Racial Justice on the Grounds of Rutgers-Camden.
• Increase Camden residents’ access to criminal and civil justice initiatives through Rutgers Law.
• Leverage the work of the Institute for the Study of Global and Racial Justice. 
• Develop and offer courses on the history of the city of Camden for Rutgers students and the general public.

• Work to institutionalize the guidelines for evaluating publicly engaged scholarship into the promotion and tenure process
• Acknowledge and reward publicly engaged scholarship through awards, merit, and promotion and tenure process.
• Create a publicly-engaged scholarship fund supporting research that includes faculty, students, and community partners collectively and addresses community focused need.
• Develop a directory of nationally recognized academics who conduct publicly-engaged research that can serve as formal external letter writers for tenure and promotion for similarly engaged faculty.
• Expand the role of the Faculty Director for Engaged Learning and Scholarship to increase awareness of engaged learning and publicly/community-engaged scholarship, connections and collaborations between faculty, staff, students, and community partners, and provide administrative support, mentoring, and advisement to faculty who pursue engaged scholarship to advance their promotions and tenure.
• Enhance communication strategies that highlight community-engaged work internally and with the broader community to increase Rutgers-Camden’s standing as a leader in civic and community engagement.
• Enhance engaged civic learning to address critical and persistent social inequities and create opportunities to sustain long-term community partnerships.
• Shift engaged civic learning courses to critical service-learning pedagogy.
• Expand participation in civic engagement and social justice certificate and adjust certificate to include diversity course requirement.
• Modify general education requirements so that all students need to participate in both a Diversity and Engaged Civic Learning course.
• Create formal mechanism for community partners to share areas of need to be addressed through engaged civic learning courses.
• Increase civic knowledge and build civic leadership capacity in Rutgers-Camden students and Camden residents.
  • Develop an interdisciplinary Civic Leadership Program for undergraduate and graduate students and city residents to increase civic literacy and participation and develop initiatives with grassroots organizations to create positive change in their local communities.
• Strengthen engagement with alumni and donors, especially those who are underrepresented to increase connections to the university.
  • Create programming that is more inclusive of the alumni base, with the development of events that focus on expanding understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • Survey interests of alumni of color and their sentiments on university engagement processes.
  • Ensure more inclusive representation of diverse alumni and faculty of color as speakers.
• Expand services at the Rutgers-Camden School of Nursing Community Health Centers in Camden's Ablett Village and Branch Village to address health inequities.
  • Increase human and financial capacity at health centers to address the health needs of the community.
  • Create a community advisory board to advise Rutgers-Camden nursing faculty and staff on community health needs and a stakeholders’ group to discuss issues uncovered by advisory boards.

• Establish diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as core campus values.
  • Develop a shared language and understanding of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
  • Develop professional standards and expectations for campus leadership to enhance and promote diversity and inclusion within their designated areas of responsibility and spheres of influence.
  • Utilize performance management system to recognize inclusive leadership as a necessary component of supervisory skills at all levels.
  • Ensure every academic and administrative unit develops a DEIA plan that build on the campus and university plan.
  • Create a robust online presence for DEIA activity at Rutgers-Camden with a communication plan for amplifying DEIA commitment and success through various media.
• Create Chancellor’s Annual Awards to celebrate faculty, staff, and students – as individuals and in teams – who advance DEIA work at Rutgers–Camden and in our communities. 
• Establish a cultural center and learning communities that educate and support the diversity in our student body.
  • Develop formal and informal events and community-building activities to educate students on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
  • Provide spaces and support for underrepresented and marginalized students to gather and create community.
• Develop opportunities for ongoing dialogue that bring faculty, staff, and students together to learn and share in ways that disrupt power dynamics and strengthen cross-role, cross-generational understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • Create a DEIA certificate for faculty, staff, and students with course modules that create a shared understanding of DEIA across stakeholders and advanced learning modules based on role and sphere of influence.
  • Ensure opportunities for all employees, regardless of role, to participate in DEIA trainings, campus dialogues and community building experiences.
• Create a transparent system to monitor and assess progress towards achieving goals outlined in campus DEIA plan.
  • Identify data streams tied to DEIA and Rutgers–Camden strategic plans and priorities to populate a web-based institutional “dashboard” that is updated on a regular basis, but not less than quarterly; track and report change over time.
  • Develop metrics to measure success of DEIA plan against progress toward goals; develop comparators within Rutgers and outside of the university; apply that information toward the public-facing dashboard; issue regular reports to University administration based on the data.
• Create a transparent campus level strategy to address bias and complaints to ensure that faculty, staff, and students feel safe and welcomed, and are able to thrive on campus.
  • Develop a transparent process and structure for addressing bias complaints that transcends institutional silos.
  • Increase capacity and align existing structures to maximize DEIA efforts on campus.
  • Create positions to report to the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Inclusion, and Civic Engagement to serve as liaisons for faculty, students, and staff with responsibility for partnering with campus units, or in some cases, directly managing DEIA initiatives.
  • Assess current campus DEIA initiatives to determine best alignment to achieve campus and university goals.
  • Formalize a standing campus wide DEIA committee with representation from all academic units, including faculty, staff, students, and alumni to implement campus strategic plan, monitor progress towards goals, and provide consistent updates on achievement of goals. 

Our people are at the heart of a successful One RBHS.  The objectives of this goal are focused on developing, supporting, and promoting our diverse workforce including our students and trainees who represent our future. The growth and evolution of the RBHS community is centered on a commitment to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion and RBHS’ core values.

Goal U1. Objective 1. Recruit, promote, and retain highly qualified and compassionate faculty, staff, students, trainees, and leaders from diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Goal U1. Objective 2. Support the recruitment, inclusion, and retention of diverse faculty, staff, students, trainees, and leaders.

Specific Initiatives:

• Ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and guidelines are clearly communicated and implemented to support the recruitment of diverse faculty, staff, students, and trainees.
• Develop outreach and recruitment strategies to reach and engage diverse candidates as part of the search, hiring, and onboarding processes.
• Provide pathways for career development, promotion, retention and leadership advancement for faculty, students, trainees, and staff across diverse backgrounds.
• Leverage the Presidential Faculty Diversity Initiative and consider supplemental RBHS recruitment programs to enhance the diversity of our faculty and trainees.

Goal U1. Objective 3. Enhance professional development, advancement, and recognition by providing support and mentorship for growth opportunities for diverse faculty, staff, students, and trainees at all levels.

Specific Initiatives:

• Expand opportunities for faculty leadership development through mentored administrative roles.
• Develop and enhance training and pathway programs for the recruitment and retention of educators, particularly in fields where there is a national shortage of practitioners.
• Build a culture of recognition and celebration, encouraging nominations of diverse faculty, staff, students, and trainees for appropriate internal and external honors, awards, and recognitions at all levels.

• Identify and enhance outreach and recruitment and explore holistic admissions processes, employing targeted practices to attract diverse student and trainee populations.

• Assess and enhance, as needed, institutional supports to ensure the success of diverse students and trainees, particularly those from under-resourced backgrounds.

• Explore development of post-doc and resident-to-faculty transition programs for those from historically underrepresented backgrounds and groups in health professions.

• Establish a workgroup to explore best practices and review the framework for promotion and advancement that considers inclusive excellence and that encompasses and values teaching, scholarship, and service.

• Enhance mentoring programs and structures of support for reducing isolation and enhancing support of diverse faculty.

• Create mechanisms to enable purposeful professional growth of diverse staff, and recognize and reward staff and administrators who promote advocacy, access, and equity.

The objectives of this goal focus on fostering excellence in the delivery of health professions and biomedical sciences education by leveraging our strengths to recruit, train, support, and prepare a diverse and highly competitive New Jersey biomedical and health sciences workforce.

Goal U1. Objective 2. Support the recruitment, inclusion, and retention of diverse faculty, staff, students, trainees, and leaders.

Specific Initiatives:

• Promote scholarly activities that advance the commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Goal M2. Objective 1. Establish a process to provide support for the schools in developing programming to prepare a diverse and interprofessional 21^st century healthcare workforce.

Specific Initiatives:

• Promote an understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion within academic disciplines and incorporate the need for cultural competency and humility across all health professions curricula.

• Support innovative scholarship and teaching by ensuring that diversity, equity, and inclusion are included in all aspects of our educational programs, teaching efforts, and research endeavors.
• Create and cultivate learning environments that consider the diverse needs and backgrounds of all students and where all students feel valued and have equal access to learn.
• Offer inclusive courses, curricula, and learning opportunities for students across RBHS schools to achieve cultural humility and antiracism learning and educational goals/competencies.

A robust RBHS research enterprise will improve health in New Jersey, address health-related social inequities, and provide an engine for discovery, innovation, and economic development.

Goal M3. Objective 2. Support and grow mutually beneficial research affiliations and scholarly activities that promote health equity and individual, community, and population health.

Specific Initiatives:

• Leverage community affiliations and stakeholder collaborations to conduct impactful clinical and population-based research to achieve health equity and enhance community and population health.
• Integrate diverse disciplinary, stakeholder, and community perspectives to engage multiple points of view on addressing problems and creating solutions through new interventions or programs, practices, or policies.
• Support community and population health research that addresses social determinants of health and improves health systems infrastructure including programs, practices, and policies.
• Address emerging community health needs, including public health emergencies, by supporting adaptable, innovative, outcome-focused, and sustainable programs, practices, and policies.

• Identify ways to acknowledge and value the efforts of those who provide substantive community engagement and have substantial community impact.

• Explore establishing and/or enhancing a Community Advisory Board with roundtables and mechanisms to ensure the voice and needs of the community is purposefully solicited and integrated as we seek to expand university-community partnerships.

• Consider how community-based translational work is rewarded or valued in evaluations and promotion.

The objectives of this goal are meant to ensure that, as a public institution, we are engaged with our local and global communities to advance research, education, and clinical care through service that addresses relevant community health challenges and needs. They are also meant to provide learners with opportunities that expand consciousness of their impacts on and within the communities they serve and increase awareness of the cultural and societal factors that impact health.

Goal M4. Objective 1. Coordinate community engagement efforts to address health issues of mutual concern and ensure effective leveraging of community and university resources.

Specific Initiatives:

• Engage with our local and global communities to advance research and service that addresses major societal issues and collaborate with these communities in sustained collaborations that work to improve our collective futures.
• Bring together multisector collaboratives and support community-led collaboratives to advance community health.
• Foster affiliations with community agencies that focus on health equity and underserved populations and make efforts to improve the quality of these collaborations.
• Encourage the use of evidence-based practices to employ a health equity lens in community engagement programming.
• Integrate diverse disciplinary, stakeholder, and community perspectives to engage multiple points of view to address problems and create solutions.

Goal M4. Objective 2. Coordinate community engagement activities across RBHS and with all Rutgers Chancellor-led units, the NJ Department of Health, and other state community services.

Specific Initiatives:

• Establish a compendium of on-going community service activities across RBHS (and Rutgers) to facilitate collaboration and operationalize community engagement across the mission areas in ways that the faculty, staff, students, and trainees will recognize.
• Create an incubator system to foster community-focused research, education, and clinical collaborations across RBHS and Rutgers.
• Establish collaborations to address the community and population health needs of New Jersey by involving local community organizations, state and federal agencies, philanthropic donors, and other stakeholders in the development of community-based research, learning, and service initiatives.
• Connect community affiliates to resources at RBHS and Rutgers, including faculty expertise, research findings, education tools, clinical services, and student service-learning opportunities.

Goal M4. Objective 3. Provide faculty, staff, students, and trainees with opportunities to learn about community engagement to positively impact community and population health.

Specific Initiatives:

• Work with strategic clinical affiliates to invest in programs for health care access, prevention, primary and specialized care, and public health to promote community and population health.
• Work with strategic affiliates to move toward a value-based health care delivery system in the communities we serve, including more emphasis on social determinants of health and population health.
• Engage in training to build capacity to address health issues of mutual concern and ensure best practices in community engagement to impact community and population health.
• Provide learning opportunities for students and trainees with community members from surrounding underserved communities to gain exposure to research or training opportunities at Rutgers.

• Identify ways to acknowledge and value the efforts of those who provide substantive community engagement and have substantial community impact.
• Explore establishing and/or enhancing a Community Advisory Board with roundtables and mechanisms to ensure the voice and needs of the community is purposefully solicited and integrated as we seek to expand university-community partnerships.
• Consider how community-based translational work is rewarded or valued in evaluations and promotion.