Center for Diversity & Community hosts first monthly follow-up meeting

Programming, marketing and past issues were the main topics on Tuesday evening at the Center for Diversity & Community for a follow-up meeting.

More than 25 students attended the meeting led by Kim Grieve, dean of student services.

Grieve said the meeting was mostly set up to discuss event programming for student organizations.

“We met before Christmas break and the students came up with a calendar and we agreed that we would meet monthly to add things to the calendar and to also make sure that all the programming was set up for success,” she said.

Because the CDC doesn’t have a director or coordinator, following the departures of Adetokunbo Oredein and Lena Tran, Grieve said it was important to keep providing students with CDC events.

“I’m working with Lamont (Sellers) to continue to make sure that students are served well through the Center for Diversity & Community,” she said.

Grieve said her direct involvement is “temporary” until the CDC director position is filled.

Senior biology major Santina Lokonobei said the meeting went well, though there were some questions left unanswered.

“I think there wasn’t a lot of discussion on issues that may have been in the past, although right now we are just looking forward. What we do now, we just have to keep going forward,” she said.

Sophomore computer science and economics double major Kevin Nam said this meeting was helpful to address some “drama” happening in the CDC.

“The CDC after the departure of Lena Tran has been facing some struggles both internally and externally,” he said. “I’m happy to see the CDC kind of recuperate and try to reorganize itself into a direction it wants to go into. I was happy to see some of the organizations represented here today with different affinity groups as well as demographic and racial groups.”

Some discussions, however, were not had during this first follow-up meeting, Nam said.

“I personally found the meeting to be kind of one-sided in nature, and that kind of worries me in a sense that maybe organizations are a little bit reluctant to express their opinions or their needs,” Nam said.

Lokonobei said this was probably due to the lack of ideas.

“A lot of students didn’t really come with too many ideas at first, so I think that’s why we didn’t have a lot of the discussions other times will have. At future meetings, we will have those discussions,” she said.

Grieve said the CDC hopes the programming will be student-led.

Lokonobei said the meeting was “streamlining the process in a way that works for the CDC.”

“(Grieve) did well,” she said. “I like how she had input from the different students and we have this forum already prepared introducing all the different workers who are going to be the resources student organizations will need, and it seemed open.”

The next follow-up meeting is Feb. 20 in the CDC.