By Ashna Balroop 

University of Maryland students painted turtles on Thursday, Oct. 17, reflecting on their communities during the bias awareness week hosted by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. 

The Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Bias Incident Support Services and LGBTQ+ Equity Center partnered with CARE to Stop Violence for the week’s various events. The Bystander Intervention Workshop, held on Oct. 17, focused on how students can be active participants in addressing bias on campus.

The week featured more events, such as a healing panel, an international pronouns day and an opportunity to meet the BISS team.

Charlotte Sheffield is an assistant coordinator in the CARE office who helped organize the Thursday event. CARE to Stop Violence is a free and confidential office located at the University Health Center that provides advocacy and therapy services to anyone who’s been impacted by things like sexual or relationship violence, stalking, harassment and any unwanted experience of that nature. 

“We really wanted to highlight the themes of how we can all play a role in creating a safer and more supportive campus, ” Sheffield said. “Whether we see incidences of bias or incidences that are related to sexual or relationship violence, we can use those same tools to speak up or support or really just make a difference to people who have been impacted.”

Sheffield believes that the workshop helped create a welcoming environment for the students in attendance.

“What we did was create an event where people could come together and have a space to enjoy and to paint and to connect with one another, have honest conversations about what it means to support someone and to also take care of yourself because being and speaking up as a bystander can be hard,” Sheffield said. 

Jennifer Valdez, a program manager for BISS, who also helped organize the workshop, said it is important to know how bias impacts our lives. 

“A key part about a community is being able to keep each other safe and to be there for each other,” Valdez said. “So bystander intervention is such an important topic that we can give our community members to hopefully just lessen the harm that gets caused.” 

Valdez wanted the workshop’s main activity, painting turtles, to reflect support and community. Students painted the turtles and became familiar with one another during the first half of the workshop by using a list of personality-related questions provided by the BISS team. 

Then, students learned about the resources within bias support services and how to be an active community member. After the conversation about bias, participants traded turtles to take with them. 

“[They’re] going to leave with someone else’s interpretation of what community means. There’s something so powerful of being able to see that I met that person or know that there’s somebody there for me on this campus,” Valdez said. 

The director of Bias Incident Support Services, b. a. Medina, helped organize this week with colleagues Kiara Dade and Valdez. 

Dade, a program manager for BISS, explains that the office’s hope is that this week will shed light on the services they provide, along with bias recognition. 

“I think people hear the word bias and have an idea of what it is, but not a concrete idea so my hopes were to educate the UMD community on addressing bias internally and externally,” Dade said.  “[This week] will spread awareness that bias does exist in our community and that is okay, but it’s important to learn how to address and educate ourselves.” 

According to Medina, the bias support services office is fairly new, having only been established approximately seven years ago. Medina explained that the overall goal of Bias Awareness Week is to inform others about the topic while shedding light on the support services group. Medina thinks this week will serve as a way for students to increase their knowledge. 

“Bias situations occur almost on the daily, if not more regularly than that. And so, for us, it’s normalizing as humans we make mistakes. It’s inviting people into [a] space around Bias Awareness Week to communicate,” Medina explained. 

Medina believes that bias is as present as ever and an important topic to discuss within the UMD community. Medina hopes Bias Awareness Week will amplify this message. 

“The hope is for us to address that, to name that, for ourselves within an office space like ours, to be able to uplift anybody who might be experiencing harm,” Medina explained.

On Tuesday, Oct. 15, Medina hosted a healing panel with Neijma Celestine-Donnor, the Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and Van Bailey, a trans youth emergency project patient navigator at the Campaign for Southern Equality with a doctorate in educational leadership. This panel, meant to complement the week, focused on supporting those with identity-based trauma.

“The panel discussion honed in on centering those harmed and providing some means for visitors, for attendees, to be able to see and to hear from experts in the field, how it is we can attend to what healing looks like,” Medina said. 

Students who have experienced bias on campus are encouraged to contact the Bias Incident Support Services Office to schedule a visit or attend an upcoming event.

Featured Image: Participants immerse themselves in turtle painting during a Bias Awareness Week workshop hosted by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Bias Incident Support Services. Photo by Ashna Balroop.