Community and Belonging at the Bloustein School
A commitment to faculty, students, staff, alumni & community partners
The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy values community and belonging and aims to improve and grow these efforts strategically by managing and assessing performance.
Accountability is shared among our family of faculty, students, staff, and external partners. Investment of School resources will be enhanced, where required, to realize our vision, mission, and purpose in alignment with our shared institutional values.
Strategic Plan
The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy is fully committed to, and unequivocally shares, Rutgers University’s core pillars related to community, equity and inclusion. These values are consistent with and essential towards the realization of a vibrant and high-performing community of support. By committing to this mission, our ability to achieve true equity, and inclusion is strengthened.
We believe in and will work towards:
- Creating, maintaining, and assessing our performance toward equity;
- Creating a diverse school-wide community of faculty, staff and students;
- Maintaining an inclusive and belonging community; and
- Creating a community of equity; equitably accessing the school’s enterprise of academic and research assets; and fostering transparently engaged communications with our family of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and external partners.
Learn More about our Five Priorities
Recruit, Retain, and Develop a Diverse Community
- Enhance outreach and recruitment processes to attract diverse student population.
- Develop support and mentorship for staff and faculty to increase belonging and retention.
- Endow student fellowships and scholarships on social and environmental justice and related research, outreach, communications, and events.
- The Bloustein School Congress should report as a standing agenda item, the School’s progress on community and belonging.
Promote Inclusive Scholarship and Teaching
- Increase support and resources for instructors to advance equity in the classroom, and recognize exemplary examples.
- Review, amend, and expand curricular offerings to promote understanding of obstacles to equity.
- Examine our curriculum to determine the necessity of revisions to include social justice issues and equity in the school’s programs.
- Provide support for curriculum revisions and expansion including time and financial resources.
- Include guest speakers to shine spotlights on contemporary issues, the school’s activities, and directions regarding equity, community and belonging.
- Leverage the University’s programs that support faculty development to support retention.
Define Sustainable and Substantive Community Engagement
- Adopt a definition of community engagement, in which reciprocity serves as a guiding principle.
- Strengthen relationships with the New Brunswick community engaging in the purposeful work of repair and relationship building.
- Facilitate long-term mutually beneficial collaborations and establish mechanisms to facilitate information and resource sharing.
- Create and/or expand academic programs to support community engagement.
- Provide and/or expand existing student opportunities to engage with community organizations.
- Collaborate with the Rutgers University Collaborative to develop a Bloustein commitment to community engagement including enhanced support and resources for current school centers and institutes to foster greater reach and scope of community engagement programming and identifying funding to support these partnerships.
- Increase and support communication, initiatives, programs. and projects across Bloustein and university silos that separate students, faculty, staff, and research staff.
- Allocate resources for events that would allow incoming students to engage with the local community.
Build the Capacity of Leaders to Create Inclusive Climates
- Articulate community, equity, and inclusion competencies for students, staff, and faculty members.
- Develop and expand opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to engage in ongoing equity and inclusion education to promote cultural humility and competency.
- Make a school-wide commitment to develop, mentor, and promote a sense of personal responsibility for creating an inclusive environment.
- Reflect the equity in terms of workload, pay, and scholarship across gender, ethnicity, and race and see that workload and compensation are equitable.
- Review everyday communications and processes to ensure equitable participation in decision-making is at the heart of shared governance.
- Reflect the contributions of the entire community throughout the Bloustein School including in shared spaces such as the lobby, hallway walls, student lounges, computer labs, and stairwells.
- Provide resources for initiatives that would familiarize students with career opportunities in urban planning, public policy, and informatics.
- Expand resources for peer mentoring for incoming international and first-generation students.
- Expand resources for students, faculty, and staff with disabilities.
- Provide training (including cultural competencies, implicit bias. etc.) to students with recognized leadership roles.
Develop an Institutional Infrastructure to Drive Change
- Audit institutional policies and practices for alignment with inclusive strategic priorities.
- Drive school-wide change by identifying a school-wide administrator and standing committee to drive instructional change.
- Provide training for faculty and staff.
- Establish information- sharing mechanisms to facilitate transparency and data-informed decision-making to support goal achievement.
Task Force at the Bloustein School
The Bloustein School’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Task Force was created in Spring 2020 to advise the dean about strategies to build awareness of and foster a positive climate for increased diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging within the school and among the school’s students, staff, and faculty.
The school is home to individuals from many cultures, races, nationalities, genders, identities, and life experiences and with different beliefs and values. The work of the Task Force is critical in embracing individuals with such multifaceted backgrounds by making them feel supported and empowered, by working through student, staff and faculty-driven processes to advance a culture of belonging, tolerance, and mutual respect for others, and by inspiring excellence in cultural awareness, competency, and equity.
The Task Force works within the framework of the foundational institutional values of Rutgers University and in consultation and collaboration with Rutgers New Brunswick initiatives.
School-wide Standing Committee on Community and Belonging
The Bloustein School’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Task Force recommended the formation of a standing committee to provide advice and counsel to the dean on matters related to equity, inclusion, and belonging. The overarching role of the Committee is to envision, develop and serve as a progressive force for transformative change within the school. The committee will give serious focus toward increasing the number of faculty, staff, and students from among historically underrepresented minority groups (as defined by federal, state, and Rutgers University workforce utilization standards). The committee will work to build awareness among the students, faculty, and staff and to create a positive learning, working, and service climate within the school, and with our external key stakeholders.
Rutgers University’s four campus-wide educational communities comprise one of the most diverse (in terms of student demographic populations) AAU, BIG TEN Academic Alliance, and research-intensive higher education institutions in the United States. However, this diversity is unevenly distributed among the four distinct campuses. It is also presumed that much of the Rutgers diversity of individuals from many cultures, races, nationalities, genders, identities, and life experiences and with different beliefs and values—is more circumstantial than intentional—given the population diversity of the New Jersey/ New York region.
The Committee on Community and Belonging is to continue the work of the Task Force created by the dean of the school. The Task Force submitted a report to the dean in February 2021. The Committee will explore deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the nature, scope, and varieties of concerns related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the school. The Committee will engage and respect the extensive input from and engagement of student, staff, and faculty-driven processes to advance a culture of belonging, caring, tolerance, and mutual respect for others, and by inspiring excellence in cultural awareness, competency, and equity. Key to the successful implementation of the previous Task Force and Committee goals is holding ourselves as a school-wide community accountable for achieving the agreed values and goals for equity and inclusion in our school.
The Committee will work within the framework of the foundational institutional values of Rutgers University and in consultation and collaboration with Rutgers New Brunswick initiatives.
The Committee will undertake the vision for equity, inclusion, and belonging at the Bloustein School by progressively undertaking, (on an ongoing basis) the committee’s core charge. These roles and functions may be expanded as recommended to the dean by the consensus of members of the Committee.
Patricia O’Brien-Richardson
Chief Community and Belonging Officer / Committee Chair
Associate Teaching Professor