By Melanie Duronio ’26
Staff Writer
Mount Holyoke was recently selected as a Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Campus Center due to its demonstrated commitment to anti-racist work and addressing systemic racism in the community. This will allow the DEI Committee to develop a long-term vision to create racial healing opportunities on campus, which includes restorative justice, collaborating with nearby communities and student feedback.
As a TRHT Center, Mount Holyoke is partnered with the American Association of Colleges & Universities, which created the organization. Its goal is to collaborate with higher education institutions that have shown a commitment to racial justice and aid them in becoming community-oriented centers.
“We are proud to have received this designation at the close of 2022 and humbled to continue working toward our anti-racist vision for the future alongside community and campus partners across the country,” Kijua Sanders-McMurty, vice president for Equity and Inclusion and chief diversity officer, wrote in a January statement.
Each TRHT Center is responsible for creating an action plan to increase equal opportunities and support for those in the community. Mount Holyoke’s plan places emphasis on restorative justice, an approach that focuses on reparations and acknowledges the harm done to people and groups.
“Part of really working toward an anti-racist future is also shifting the ways that we are understanding how we perpetuate harm,” Lauren Gaia, chief of staff and strategic communications for the DEI office, said. “The vision is to start at the individual level … what is it like for a student, student of color, a first-gen student [or] a student of marginalized identity to exist at Mount Holyoke and what are the barriers that might not be seen at a staff or faculty level.”
Mount Holyoke has already used restorative justice methods with Indigenous communities in the area. Their work includes the Indigenous Students Scholarship, which was implemented to encourage First Nations applicants and acknowledge the College’s past exclusion of Indigenous students and perspectives. Indigenous speakers, healers and artists have also been invited to the College for events and hosted workshops based on their experiences. These reparations were made to acknowledge the harm Mount Holyoke has perpetrated against First Nations peoples.
“We’re trying to make sure the things we are doing … to attend to and repair harm are not devised by folks traditionally at the center or at the top of hierarchies, but are really being envisioned by folks most proximate [to the harm],” Gaia said.
Another aspect of DEI’s TRHT Center vision is forming connections between Mount Holyoke and the surrounding cities of Holyoke and Springfield. Specifically, they aim to connect with high schools, community colleges and vendors in the area to create opportunities for racial healing discussions.
Previously, DEI has worked with local organizations looking for resources to diversify their communities, such as the Loomis Retirement Village. The committee has held diversity training sessions centered around intersectionality with Loomis and plans to invite them to the annual DEI learning symposium BOOM! to encourage multigenerational spaces of discussion regarding identity. Other schools such as Holyoke High School and Holyoke Community College are working on restorative justice programs of their own and may collaborate with the College’s DEI office.
For the past two months, Mount Holyoke has also been working with the town of South Hadley to develop its own DEI plan that would provide similar training sessions to vendors throughout the Village Commons.
“We wanted to make sure all those diversity, equity and inclusion opportunities were available to people who wanted to continue to do the work of racial healing, both within Mount Holyoke and [also including] anyone who was peripheral to the campus,” Sanders-McMurty said.
The DEI Committee sees student voices and involvement as a key part of its vision. As a TRHT Center, they hope to gain the funding needed to organize immersive opportunities for students. Those opportunities would be similar to the racial healing trips faculty and staff have taken, such as last year’s trip to Atlanta.
This Atlanta trip focused on the civil rights movement. Attendants participated in the Civil Rights Heritage Tour, a program honoring people who participated in the movement and remain unrecognized. From Atlanta, the group traveled to Selma, walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and took a bus tour of important places visited by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
“There are still a lot of perilous realities of life in modern America, particularly for Black and brown people,” Gaia said in regard to the Atlanta trip. “How can we simultaneously honor the past and [think] about where we are in the present moment and [remain] fiercely committed to doing something differently?”
In the future, Sanders-McMurty hopes for students to travel to cities such as Atlanta and Memphis, and visit museums such as the Holocaust Museum and an indigenous American museum in D.C. These trips would provide an immersive aspect to Mount Holyoke’s racial healing vision and encourage students to reflect on the history of racial justice.
“I think for students … you’re only here for four years and those four years should be an incredible experience,” Sanders-McMurty said. “It shouldn’t be hindered by all these kinds of ways that people harm each other.”
As a TRHT Center, the DEI Committee is looking forward to continuing their anti-racist work and elaborating on their long-term vision to make Mount Holyoke a safer and more welcoming place.
“I think truth, racial healing and transformation are big, lofty concepts and ideals. I am most looking forward to the fact that this provides a touchstone for our entire community to have this point of reflection that this is [work] we’re committed to,” Gaia said.