SUNY Jamestown Community College has developed a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statement — the first of its kind for the college.

The statement is just the starting point, said Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force chair Simone Sellstrom.

The college’s statement reads as follows: “We embrace the varied identities, histories, and experiences of every member of our college community. We actively pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion, recognizing that we are always learning.”

“A diversity statement is kind of the college’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion,” Sellstrom said. “Our statement went through a number of things. We did some college polling of our faculty, staff and students to understand what diversity means at JCC and understanding how that works (and) how it comes through in like the lived experiences of people on campus.”

The statement was created by the DEI Task Force over a few months that included a group of 18 individuals from across the spectrum of the campus. She said the college had some primary goals when sitting down to write the statement, including making the statement “accessible.” She said the college serves a diverse population — high school students, non-traditional students, community members and various others in the community.

“Sometimes you’ll read diversity statements on other college websites and while they’re very good and they’re very full, they’re not necessarily the most accessible statements and there’s a lot of terminology and phrasing in there,” Sellstrom said. “It was really important that our statement was easily read by a variety of audiences and that people could look at it and be like, ‘OK, yeah, I get that.'”

Sellstrom said the idea of diversity, and what the college wanted to include in the statement, is that diversity is “always a work in progress.”

“As humans, as people, as a campus institution — we are always learning,” she said. “We’re learning about identity, we’re learning how to treat people better, we’re learning how to make accommodations for different identities. It’s never something that stops, and so we were really intentional in recognizing that this is an ongoing process and an ongoing commitment. The statement is really the beginning of the groundwork for the diversity, equity and inclusion work on the campus.”

She said the idea is to make sure that everyone on campus feels welcome, to make sure students’ needs are being met and to recognize and be sensitive to the fact that people on campus come from various backgrounds.

“As an institution, higher education is recognizing that students are coming to us from all different backgrounds, histories and experiences and identities, and when all those backgrounds come into one classroom or onto one campus, in what way are you making room for those identities to be expressed and valued in your campus community?” Sellstrom said.

Sellstrom is the director of Media, Visual and Performing Arts and the coordinator of Communication and Studio Arts for the college, which she said plays into her role as DEI Task Force chair.

“I’m a communications professor, right, and one of the primary factors that goes into communication is identity,” she said. “So, every single conversation we’re having, we’re bringing our identity to that conversation and we’re filtering that conversation through identity and identity work is diversity work. For me, I’m already talking about it in my classes and I’m already working through it from a communication and media perspective. We talk a lot about representation and media, so it fits really naturally with my discipline, what I was working on in my classrooms and kind of my own individual passion.”

Those interested in learning more about the task force, the statement and upcoming DEI events, can visit https://www.sunyjcc.edu/about/dei.