NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY GEOEQUITY INITIATIVE

Graduate students in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) at Northwestern University (NU) called upon the department for a discussion regarding race and inequity in the Earth Science field. The NU GeoEquity initiative was created from these discussions. GeoEquity strives to build a departmental culture that emphasizes anti-racism education, celebrates outreach, and works toward fostering an inclusive environment for every student.

This initiative is comprised of three pillars: Outreach and Fundraising, Inclusion and Diversity, and Anti-Racism. In each group, we aim to facilitate community discussion, culture shifts, and policy changes.

The Outreach and Fundraising group promotes local fundraising, outreach, and volunteer opportunities to our NU/Chicago community. The Inclusion and Diversity group changes and creates policy reduce barriers to entry in geosciences and aims to build an environment of inclusivity through providing mentorship and resources to individuals. The Anti-Racism pillar intends to educate our EPS community on systemic racism so that we can better identify racist policies and ideas in our department and respective sub-fields. This pillar serves as a foundation to GeoEquity as an anti-racist community that centers the voices affected by systemic oppression and drives changes that will support these individuals. At a predominantly white institution, such as NU, an anti-racist foundation has potential to reduce the burden on department members of color to enact these changes.

GeoEquity has already reinvigorated the existing efforts to abolish the GRE for graduate school admission. Additionally, we have proposed the option of implementing a citizenship component of the graduate program. GeoEquity has created an anti-racism discussion group open to all members of the community, and we are working on highlighting the active service culture of our department. We will continue to increase transparency with graduate school recruiting, create a culture that celebrates outreach, service, and anti-racism education. We will work to include the undergraduate perspective, and partner with other departments across campus to instill greater community change.