What is the Engaged Pluralism Initiative?
EPI is an initiative where you can activate community around your ideas, and where collective responses to old and new problems are generated, nourished, and often moved to action. The initiative provides a unique opportunity for cross-pollination between students, faculty, administrators, and staff from all over the College. Participants regularly interact through non-hierarchical forms of engagement and dialogue. Working groups are democratic; all perspectives are valued; and students co-facilitate with employees. Sharing and drawing from our individual knowledge, we take collective action towards strengthening our communities. Together, we achieve more.
Why join EPI?
In EPI, you practice developing connections with a variety of human experience, expand your knowledge of social worlds and institutions, and play an active and collective role in your community. This initiative is a testing ground for people to contribute to the thinking and practices around making our world a more inclusive and vibrant place to live, study, and work, starting with Vassar. EPI participants cultivate relationships, experience teaching, mentoring, and learning, and nurture the scholar-activist-leader in themselves and others.
A snapshot of EPI’s work includes: a performance and storytelling workshops with Anna Deveare Smith; a symposium on multilingualism and the global campus; working with teachers on educational programming for local area middle and high schoolers; biannual “World Cafes” where we share our work, get feedback, and intentionally commingle our perspectives; EPI students, administrators, and faculty initiated inter-institutional exchanges in order to collaborate and launch STEPP—a program in which students and faculty partner to create more inclusive classroom experiences. To read more about each of these endeavors and much more, check out our timeline and past newsletters.