Making excellence inclusive informs everything we do as an office. ODECE’s work impacts thousands of students, staff and faculty at CU Boulder each year. ODECE's programs and events consistently support students’ academic success and create opportunities for campus and community members to learn and grow. These values empower us to achieve the Chancellor’s three strategic imperatives of shaping tomorrow's leaders, being the top public university for innovation, and positively impacting humanity.
Examples
- Within the Colorado Diversity Initiative, the SMART program has been providing support to graduate students in STEM fields for many years. To date, the program has impacted at least 750 graduate students as they entered their advanced degree programs at CU Boulder.
- ODECE's pre college outreach and engagement programs, currently provide mentoring, tutoring and other academic enrichment to about 1,500 students and families in the Denver/Boulder area, Roaring Fork Valley, Summit County, Ft. Morgan, the San Luis Valley and tribal communities. Since its inception in 1983, this program has worked with 45,000 students and their families, exposing them to the promise of higher education.
- ODECE manages $2 million in Colorado Opportunity Scholarship Intitiative (COSI) funds, which provides scholarships and academic enrichment programs to 300 CU Boulder students.
- In 2020–21, ODECE and CISC developed and led multiple workshops, discussion groups and volunteer opportunities that focused on belonging and community for our students, faculty and staff, including the Diversity and Inclusion Summits and the semester-long “Power of Community: Courage, Healing and Unity.” About 4,500 people attended these events.
- A collaboration among the provost’s office, ODECE, schools and colleges, and the faculty and academic affairs offices has led to the creation of the CU Boulder Faculty Diversity Action Plan. This initiative is focused on achieving the university’s faculty and other diversity goals and to promote measures to prevent implicit bias and other forms of discrimination during the faculty hiring process and to improve faculty retention.
