Pillars of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan
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Recruitment & Retention
The University of King’s College commits to ensuring that equity and inclusion are integrated through all elements of recruitment, education access, enrollment, and retention. This pillar will highlight capacity building, training, access, and representation goals.
King’s recognizes the need for continuous improvement and the creation of opportunities to address gaps for equity-deserving students, faculty, instructors, and staff. Particularly with Indigenous persons (especially Mi’kmaq), persons with a disability, racialized persons, including persons of Black/African descent (especially African Nova Scotians), women, and persons of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity who would contribute to the diversification of our community.
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Systems & Structures
King’s is committed to enhancing community members’ experiences and creating a high-quality learning environment that fosters student success in the classroom and beyond. King’s acknowledges the need to integrate EDI throughout university policies, communication, student services and partnerships to accomplish this. Furthermore, King’s recognizes opportunities to address service gaps for equity-deserving students, faculty, instructors and staff. This pillar will highlight goals in the areas of policies, practices, processes and connections to community.
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Belonging & Benchmarks
King’s will collect disaggregated demographic data to better understand the community’s representation, experiences, and perspectives. Data is essential in any decision-making process and it will help the university make more insightful and informed decisions supporting the design of equitable and inclusive practices, services and collegiality. Using data to discover patterns will help to reveal problems. This pillar will highlight goals in the areas of data collection, engagement, consultation, reporting, and transparency of data. The collection of this data will strengthen King’s and help the university to develop a shared, responsive definition of equity that will evolve over time.
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Acknowledgement & Accountability
King’s work is not limited to campus borders. It requires the university to actively reach out to broader communities to support change, learn, acknowledge the university’s history, and dismantle structural underrepresentation. This pillar will highlight goals in the areas of responding to the TRC Calls to Action, incorporating the principles, actions, and accountabilities of the Scarborough Charter, engaging with communities in Nova Scotia, and continuing the discussion in response to the scholarly inquiry into King’s historic connections to slavery.
King’s also recognizes that opportunities for innovative learning are missed when perspectives that expand or disrupt conventional understandings are left out or marginalized. Therefore, to fulfill the university’s commitments to the community and ensure our ambitious and critical plans are implemented, King’s strives to be more welcoming and inclusive as part of its continued journey to be a more ethical institution.
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Campus Climate
King’s will strive to create an environment and culture of inclusivity for all community members. King’s will work to instill trust, a sense of belonging and establish equitable practices on an individual and institutional level helping the university to create a shared definition of equity and support. This pillar will highlight goals in the areas of creating safer spaces, building a pipeline for success and enhancing existing initiatives.
As the university grows, King’s will define and continue building a culture of care by creating safe spaces through physical and cultural development, working toward attitudinal changes, and ensuring psychological safety, enabling all to fulfill their emotional, educational, and professional potential.