What We Do and How We Do It

Coordination

The University of Maine System’s (UMS) organizational structure includes each of its communities and the shared services network serving them. UMS Transforms creates cross-university work on significant academic, athletic, student services and structure programs. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work is being done simultaneously by campus DEI councils and individual advocates across the system.

The UMS DEI Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Steering Committee is responsible for:

University/Campus Diversity Councils are responsible for:

Other Partners:

UMS Transforms

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Our Approach

Cultures constitute the totality of their constituents’ collective thoughts, actions and behaviors; Culture is the product and experienced outcome of them.  The group who comprises and therefore creates/recreates their culture every day, can be intentional about shaping their culture. In fact, when a group wants to enhance their culture in a lasting, meaningful way, the effort is about demonstrating the value, motivating for culture renovation and then having culture members systematically embed new practices into the cultures places, processes and products. UMS is using a proven culture renovation framework that acknowledges there is so much that is good and solid in our UMS cultures even while we work to enhance them for greater diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The attitude toward organizational culture has started to evolve. Progressive boards are no longer passive on this issue. The bottom line: Organizations with a healthy culture have staying power and an enormous advantage over their competitors. As our research shows conclusively, organizations with healthy cultures outperform organizations with lesser cultures in virtually every measure. Only 15 percent of [organizations] that embark on culture change are successful. We distilled [our research] into 18 steps – a culture change blueprint.” – Kevin Oakes. Author: Culture Renovation. January 2021

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Projection:

Initiatives already underway, alignment already in place and genuine commitment to this important work has served as a critical foundation. As the results of the Campus DEI Climate Survey are analyzed and supplemented with focus groups, developing and implementing strategies to address the findings will be key next steps. Implementing a professional development curriculum, an inclusive talent acquisition and care/support approach, continuing our work with our Admissions offices in creating an inclusive student experience for incoming students and also providing similar training for offices and departments who are responsible for onboarding and retaining students are all seen as important priorities for the next two to four years.

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Guiding Principles

Recognizing that terms and definitions can shift frequently in the field of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the UMS DEI Steering Committee aligns to guiding principles in our approach:

• We rally around a broad definition of diversity that includes many dimensions of our human identity, including and not limited to protected class dimensions supported by federal and state laws
• We understand that our brain’s function to organize information naturally creates implicit bias, because our brain organizes content using internalized socially created criteria; We believe that awareness and critical thinking can ensure we shift from implicit bias to inclusion by intention
• Our commitment is to an equity approach to achieving equality; provide each person with what they uniquely need and create equal opportunities for all
• We believe focusing in this space can reveal, foster and maximize the numerous benefits of DEI including and not limited to greater collective care/humanity, broader awareness of the global landscape for which we are preparing our students, increased innovation that comes from more voices/ideas shared and heard
• We work collaboratively in transformative relationships with each other in order to achieve that in our cultures; we understand that this work cannot be accomplished fully through just transactional relationships/work
• Power and privilege are difficult dynamics, topics and circumstances to navigate. We commit to advocacy, listening to really understand and getting it right.