Justice Leadership Council (New England)
What is the JLC?
JLC is a group of students, faculty, and staff that ensures university-wide accountability for the authentic living of our mission for equity, fairness, unity, and welcoming all voices to speak their truth. JLC is an advisory council to the provost’s office with representation from all departments, programs, and offices on campus. In response to the students, staff, and faculty voices in the past years, we are striving to honor and build on the work of our predecessors and current allies working to ensure that AUNE is living up to its social justice mission.
Mission:
To ensure university wide accountability for the authentic living of AUNE’s mission for equity, fairness, unity, and welcoming all voices to respectfully have dialogue in pursuit of that mission. We make a commitment to further AUNE’s mission of social justice by speaking truth to the reality of the moment and by centering the needs of marginalized folks in the work that we provide.
Vision:
JLC is driven to remain accountable for creating and maintaining a just academic environment. We recognize that all people are dynamic, and imperfect, living in a world that separates each of us into parts that are privileged and/or oppressed in various areas. We honor that each person’s experience of oppression is unique based on their intersectionality. The truth is we are equal and the reality is we are not treated as such. Therefore, we dedicate time and effort to learn and use anti-oppression frameworks, and we realize that allyship is not just an identity, but a practice and skill. To aid in our process, JLC’s community of people seek a just citizenship where we act swiftly and responsibly when good intentions may impact community members negatively. We strive to have all voices and people involved in the process of equity and inclusion while prioritizing historically marginalized voices in the context of the United States.
Goals:
- To build a connection between those with power and oppressed
- Uplifting and elevating historically marginalized voices
- Moving the AUNE mission into action
- Strive to be in leadership roles within and outside of Antioch
- To create unity
- Provide monthly training committing to education and skill building.
- Support AUNE to develop ‘change agents’ in all aspects of their lives
Values:
- Promoting a passion for equity for all people
- Embrace our mistakes and commit to do better once we know better
- Acknowledge justice as a life-long process filled with successes and failures
- Repairing ruptures when they occur within the group through transformation and liberation
Action:
Since 2017, JLC has strived to live its mission by providing educational opportunities, initiatives, and resources to the AUNE community. Some examples include, but are not limited to, the Period Project, voter registration initiatives, Trans 101 workshops, cross-class dialogues, allyship and anti-oppression training, a Juneteenth Vigil acknowledging Black Lives lived and murdered in America, and petitioning for all-gender restrooms on campus. We welcome the creativity, voices, and ideas of all community members and will continue to live our mission in this way.
Contacts:
- Email: [email protected]
Recent initiatives/Updates:
Resources for Awareness and Knowledge: The year 2020 proved to be a difficult time in our country and for our students. In March, the COVID-19 pandemic caused AUNE to close its physical campus and move all courses to remote learning. While this impacted our students greatly, we were extremely aware that the pandemic was also affecting our students financially. To help support students in this uncertain time, JLC provided grocery gift cards to students in need.
As the semester continued additional concerns arose around racial injustice and police brutality within this country with the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. As members of the AUNE community, JLC is aware of the impact of this violence disproportionately affecting our Black colleagues and friends. Along with encouragement to check in to offer support and solidarity, JLC created a resource document providing resources for those seeking anti-racist education and action steps and also held a vigil. This online vigil took place on Juneteenth, a national day for recognizing the end of slavery, and included a call to action in support of Black Lives Matter.
This past year, JLC has been working to send a social justice and demographic survey to the AUNE community. These surveys aimed to determine if we are living our mission at AUNE and to see who we are as the AUNE campus. In the upcoming year, our plan is to conduct an analysis of the data collected to determine how we can better live our mission and what resources we can provide to our students, staff, faculty, and administration. With the addition of new questions to the student course evaluations, JLC has been working to identify the best options to create more resources for community members on various social justice issues.
With positive feedback from the workshop last year, we continued our support of the Cross-Class dialogue workshop series. This took place over six weeks in collaboration with ACT for Social Justice. Students and staff across the class spectrum came together to listen to each other’s stories and perspectives while learning about the complexities of economic justice.
JLC also collaborated with and attended Keene State College’s Courageous Conversations on October 14th around the topic of Indigenous People’s Day. The conversation included a declaration from the Mayor along with conversations from students, staff, and Abenaki people in the greater Keene area. Discussions around land and education were primary topics addressed in this conversation along with other valuable information and opinions on the topic of Indigenous People’s Day.
New Office Space for Student Groups: There are multiple student groups that are committed to social justice. To bring more collaboration, several of these groups are now housed in room 258 (between the AP suite and the student lounge). This space is intended for students to meet, communicate, and explore ideas and issues around social justice. Come visit us to voice any ideas, questions, or concerns around social justice! Please let us know if any other groups should be added.
Projects:
- AUNE Student Social Justice and Demographic Survey
- LGBTQIA+ Student Support Group*
- Amplifying Black Voices
- Recruitment and Retention of Black Students
- Social Justice Blog
- Student Grocery and Food Support
- Multicultural Student Center and Support
- Event Planning (Fall Full Campus Gathering, Living Our Mission Series, Providing Workshops)
- Curricula Review*
- International Student Resources and Support*
- Implementation of non-gender binary infrastructure (bathrooms, forms)
- Intersectional Community Collective
*All initiatives were borne out of the direct experiences of students.