Diversity Innovation Awards

2008-2009 Recipients

• Undergraduate Student Award: Robert Taylor
• Faculty Award: Dr. Dana Nichols
• Student Group Award: Women and Gender Studies Club
• Bricoleur Award: Dr. Arlette Miller Smith

The Diversity Innovation Award (DIA)

The Diversity Innovation Award (DIA) recognizes the outstanding diversity involvement and accomplishments of students, faculty, and staff at St. John Fisher College. Recipients have demonstrated a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion through community service work; recruitment and retention efforts; research; teaching; cultural competency; cultural programming; and other efforts that promote dialogue and equitable treatment of all. Diversity work is a set of conscious practices that assume acceptance and respect for others. It moves beyond the acknowledgment of people's differences and connects with those differences to create a fairer and more productive campus environment. Institutions that promote diversity allow the exploration of differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. (Campus Diversity Advisory Board Draft Statement 2007)

Bricoleur Award

Bricoleur is the French term for handyperson; the everyday person who creates things from scratch and who is resourceful in doing so; a person who collects information and things, putting them together in ways they were never intended originally to be used. If the Bricoleurs had a motto, it would be: "To do what we can, when we can, with what we have." At Fisher no one person or group has the resources at hand to tackle the myriad, complex, and layered issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. However, there are individuals (handywomen/men) and groups who recognize that something must be done. Given the often limited resources at hand - whether they are time, finances, expertise, etc. - these individuals and groups manage to develop a cadre of innovative ways to address the issues of inclusion and equitable treatment within their personal and/or collective spheres of influence.

Browse our Archive of Past Work for previous Diversity Innovation Awards events