Chief Diversity Officer of Equity and Inclusion
Centennial Campus - A324
5675 S. Academy Blvd.
Colorado Springs, Colorado
WK: 719-502-2828
FAX: 719-502-2201
Tiko.Hardy@ppcc.edu
The Pikes Peak Community College Foundation was awarded a Colorado Opportunity Scholarship Initiative Community Partner Program 4-Year Grant beginning July 2020 worth $684,000. The grant was created to support post-secondary student support service programs that work to increase student retention and completion rates at the post-secondary level.
Pikes Peak Community College received the 2021 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine in August 2020. It was the third consecutive year that PPCC received the award.
The Pikes Peak Community College Child Development Center was selected to participate in the University of Colorado Denver Center for Inclusive Design and Engineering (CIDE) Preschool Development Grant: Inclusion & Universal Design Project in May 2021.
Student of the Year
Colorado Community College System Student Excellence Award
Faculty/Instructor of the Year
Staff Member of the Year
Outstanding Community Leader
Distinguished Service
Student of the Year
Colorado Community College System Student Excellence Award
Faculty/Instructor of the Year
Staff Member of the Year
Outstanding Community Leader
Distinguished Service
Student of the Year
Staff Member of the Year
Faculty of the Year
Outstanding Community Leader
Distinguished Service
Student of the Year
Staff Member of the Year
Faculty of the Year
Outstanding Community Leader
Distinguished Service
Student of the Year
Nzallah Whong, Global Village Facilitator
Staff Member of the Year
Kristina Charfauros, Administrative Assistant & Events Coordinator, Student Life
DEI Faculty of the Year
Katherine Sturdevant, Professor, History
Pikes Peak Community College (PPCC) is committed to serving the good of the community. We do this by educating people. We provide open access to higher education and a high quality learning environment in which students can realize new opportunities and gain critical, 21st century skills they need to succeed in the workforce or in further education. Teaching people how to work effectively with others, across boundaries, is central to our mission.
This begins with welcoming and valuing people for who they are and for the unique contributions each person adds to our campus. It also requires our faculty, staff and students to encounter, explore and understand a broad range of ideas and cultures. Our community college mission is inseparable from the ever-increasing diversity in our society.
Diverse and inclusive learning and working environments promote a free and open exchange of ideas, improve critical thinking, civic engagement and leadership skills, and deepen empathy and respect for those unlike ourselves. Our campus is enriched by a variety of voices and experiences.
Attracting, hiring and retaining a highly engaged workforce that reflects and supports the diversity of our student body are of central importance to our work. Other essential factors are expanding and strengthening opportunities for students to learn and succeed through culturally responsive instruction and diversity-infused course offerings. We ensure that diversity represents a process of continual learning and improvement by developing, cultivating and sustaining an organizational culture based on mutual respect, inquiry and civility. (PPCC Diversity Team, October 2015)
Established in February, 2017, and last updated in February 2021.
Individual differences (e.g., personality, learning styles, and life experiences) and group/social differences (e.g., race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and ability as well as cultural, political, religious, or other affiliations).
Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2016
NOTE: Group and social differences are manifested in various forms among our administration, faculty, staff, and students including but not limited to: differences of gender, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, age, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, language, work classification, military service, socio-economic status, and ability.
Cultural competence is having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the varying cultural and community norms of students and their families. It is the ability to understand the within-group differences that make each student unique, while celebrating the between-group variations that make our country a tapestry. This understanding informs and expands teaching practices in the culturally competent educator’s classroom.
National Education Association, 2015
The creation of opportunities for historically underrepresented populations to have equal access to and participate in educational programs that are capable of closing the achievement gaps in student success and completion.
Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2016
The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions.
Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2016
An educational reform that strives to increase the engagement and motivation of students of color who historically have been both unsuccessful academically and socially alienated from their public schools.
Vavrus, 2008, p. 49
The definition consists of four primary elements:
1. A focus on student intellectual and social development. Academically, it means offering the best possible course of study for the context in which the education is offered.
2. A purposeful development and utilization of organizational resources to enhance student learning. Organizationally, it means establishing an environment that challenges each student to achieve academically at high levels and each member of the campus to contribute to learning and knowledge development.
3. Attention to the cultural differences learners bring to the educational experience and that enhance the enterprise.
4. A welcoming community that engages all of its diversity in the service of student
and organizational learning.
Williams, Berger, and McClendon, 2005
According to Marilyn Cochran-Smith, a leading scholar in education, a social justice framework is one that:
"Actively addresses the dynamics of oppression, privilege, and isms, and recognizes that society is the product of historically rooted, institutionally sanctioned stratification along socially constructed group lines that include race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability (among others). Working for social justice means guiding others and being guided in critical self-reflection about the socialization into the matrix of unequal relationships and its implications, analysis of the mechanisms of oppression, and the ability to challenge these hierarchies."
Basically, a social justice framework is a way of seeing and acting aimed at resisting unfairness and inequity while enhancing freedom and possibility for all. It pays primary attention to how people, policies, practices, curricula, and institutions may be used to liberate rather than oppress those least served by our decision making.
Sensoy, O. & DiAngelo, R., 2009
Unity is being together or at one with someone or something. It's the opposite of being divided.
1. - n. An undivided or unbroken completeness or totality with nothing wanting.
Vocabulary.com, 2017
Fairness is the quality of making judgments that are free from discrimination.
1.A. - n. Conformity with rules or standards, 1.B. - n. Ability to make judgments free from discrimination or dishonesty.
Vocabulary.com, 2017
When you value something, you consider it important and worthwhile.
1. - n. The quality (positive or negative) that renders something desirable or valuable.
Vocabulary.com, 2017
Belonging is a sense of fitting in or feeling like you are an important member of a group.
1. n. Happiness felt in a secure relationship.
Vocabulary.com, 2017