The University of Wisconsin launched a new website as part of its Diversity Inventory database on Tuesday, designed to make campus diversity initiatives more accessible to students and staff.
The Diversity Inventory website contains a list of older initiatives along with a portal function to submit new ones.
The website also shares graphs and data which display initiative counts, populations served and fund levels for initiatives for the entire campus and particular academic and administrative groups.
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“[The website] strives to increase awareness of existing resources, enhance coordination of activities among campus partners, and efficiently collect and report diversity-related data,” UW said in a newsletter sent on Tuesday.
The submissions portal on the new website allows students and staff to suggest initiatives from the previous fiscal year, which can be updated through the end of the current fiscal year.
In progress and recently added initiatives can be accessed by the person who submits them, users in the same department and other officials, according to the website. Students and staff have already uploaded around 600 initiatives to the database, with 42% submitted by students, according to the newsletter.
The database was first launched as the Diversity Inventory Program in 2017, three years after UW Chancellor Rebecca Blank called for a diversity program inventory in 2014. Though, this earlier program was less comprehensive and was not available to all students and staff.
According to UW’s Diversity Framework plan, the website serves as a part of UW’s broader goal of becoming a “model public university in the 21st century.” UW hopes the page will serve as a resource to the public and change makers.
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The framework’s goals include promoting diversity and inclusion, improving campus diversity planning, engaging campus leadership, increasing institutional access through effective recruitment of diverse students and staff and enhancing institutional success through improved retention, according to the Diversity Framework website.
