Carleton College offers mentorship program exclusively for 'BIPOC' students
The Office of Intercultural Life of Carleton College recently published a list of upperclassmen who will serve in the 2024-2025 Peer Mentorship Program, which caters specifically to minority students.
The OIL states that the program 'offers guidance and support for first-year BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] students in making a smooth transition to Carleton.'
The Office of Intercultural Life (OIL) of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota recently published a list of upperclassmen who will serve in the school’s 2024-2025 Peer Mentorship Program, which caters specifically to minority students.
The OIL states that the program “offers guidance and support for first-year BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] students in making a smooth transition to Carleton.”
The program offers a wide range of opportunities to participating students, including private meetings with a designated mentor, “personalized supports and resources,” and program-specific field trips.
OIL’s Carleton web page states that it “has a unique role of providing direct support through programming that affirms, supports, and engages students of color,” which includes “leadership and skill development,” “DEI facilitation and dialogue,” “community building and allyship,” and “cross/intercultural awareness and knowledge.”
In addition to the Peer Mentorship Program, OIL runs and operates several other diversity-based initiatives, including a “dialogue series” that hosts discussions featuring various students and faculty members. The issues discussed during these dialogues span a range of issues, including “Critical Race Theory, intersectional sexual health, Indigenous story-telling, the impact of tourism on Hawaiian land and culture, and so much more!”
OIL functions as an arm of Carleton’s broader commitment to “Community, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” (CEDI), a formalized group of policies and governance structures which execute the aims laid out in the school’s diversity statement.
“CEDI plays a special listening and hortatory role (part of the ‘conscience’ of the College), being attentive to community concerns and raising issues that are not attended to elsewhere on campus,” the school’s website reads. “We give voice to student, faculty, or staff concerns. We strive to be proactive, educative, and communicative. When appropriate, we help coordinate and connect the many efforts supporting diversity and inclusion on campus.”
In April 2022, the college released a long-term “Community Plan for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity” which aims to “make equity and inclusion a central factor in all of our processes and actions, so that IDE isn’t merely an ‘add-on’ to business as usual, but a catalyst that transforms those processes and actions.”
These goals include programs that “significantly increase representation of students, faculty, and staff from underrepresented populations” as well as efforts to “integrate and sustain engagement with the principles of IDE, including the full diversity of perspectives, experiences, and intellectual contributions of historically underrepresented voices.”
Campus Reform has contacted Carleton College as well as the school’s Director of Intercultural Life for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.