About the Council

Council Charge

The Diversity Council was created in 1994. At the time, the Council’s charge was to organize activities and initiatives in support of the IPFW diversity mission, which stated that IPFW “seeks to demonstrate through curriculum, support systems, and policies that it values individual differences, strives to create and maintain a campus environment that welcomes diverse characteristics, backgrounds, and experiences, and to identify such diversity as a vital source of the intellectual, social, and personal growth essential to a university education” (1994). These goals were later formalized and incorporated into the IPFW Strategic Plan.

The Diversity Council’s charge was redefined in 2003 as follows:

To monitor and report on progress toward all the diversity-related goals of the IPFW Strategic Plan, and to make recommendations for improvement. To this end, the Council, with staff support through the chair and the new Assessment Director, will:

• develop, in collaboration with the responsible unit(s), a plan for coordinating and reporting on diversity-related activities that are intended to meet Strategic Plan goals
• develop, in collaboration with the responsible units, a plan for monitoring and reporting on the progress of the various diversity-related initiatives that are part of the process of institutional transformation
• publish an Annual Report on diversity activities/initiatives and their impact
• make recommendations for how to increase impact (e.g., training, development, best practices, resource allocation)
• develop and administer an annual budget for funding new initiatives and projects
• develop criteria and priorities for funding

The first Annual Accomplishments Report, for the 2004 calendar year, was published in 2005.