Bradley’s first Diversity Leadership Conference will occur Saturday at the Hayden Clark Peplow Pavilion.
“This conference is about enriching Bradley University by providing the community with a foundation of diversity awareness and cultural sensitivity while also empowering students to take action and make a difference,” senior criminal justice major Judith De La Vega said.
De La Vega is the student engagement intern for Office of Diversity & Inclusion and serves as the chairperson of the conference.
The conference is the fourth and final event for the Conversation Continues series sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Student Services.
Throughout this semester, the office has hosted a series of events, from “Coffee with BUPD” to “Teaching Ferguson” to the Garrett Cultural Center’s Town Hall Meeting, in an effort to provide the Bradley community with a forum to talk about critical diversity-related issues.
According to De La Vega, the Conversation Continues series transpired last semester as a result of the Ferguson, Missouri controversy surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. The conference will not directly touch upon the topic of Ferguson but will engage with a lot of the questions and sentiments it brought up.
The conference will consist mainly of workshops such as “Who am I?”, “Expectation versus Reality”, and “Social Inequality and the Meaning of Diversity”.
“In regards to the workshops, people can expect to engage in a lot of open dialogue discussions relating to diversity and inclusion,” De La Vega said. “The workshops are also an opportunity to develop leadership skills that are relevant to the global and multicultural world we live in.”
Speaking at the event will be several members of Bradley’s faculty and staff, such as Asian Studies Department Chair Jacqueline Hogan, sociology professor Sarah Whetstone, Executive Director of Diversity and Inclusion Norris Chase and Director of Student Activities Tom Coy. Two Bradley alumni will also be speaking: Jen White (’11), a Diversity and Inclusion Consultant for Caterpillar, and Cirilo Hurtado (’86), a Senior Applications Engineer for Exxon Mobil.
The keynote speaker for the conference will be Menah Pratt-Clarke, the Associate Chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of “Critical Race, Feminism, and Education: A Social Justice Model.”
“I’m optimistic that the conference will be the office’s staple event and that it will positively lead Bradley towards a more inclusive campus environment,” De La Vega said.
The conference will be held Saturday, April 25 from 9:30 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. and is free for all Bradley students, faculty and staff. The registration deadline for the conference is Wednesday, April 22.
For more information about the Diversity Leadership Conference or to register, visit budiversityconference.weebly.com.
