The Racism Stops With Me campaign was a university-wide antiracist campaign that launched in 2021. 

The campaign covered a multitude of different projects, from a marketing push to a university-wide survey, which attempted to gauge the temperature of students belonging on campus. By the time Ravello Goods had her first full semester as the Chief Diversity Officer in the fall of 2024, not much of the Racism Stops With Me campaign was left, and the remnants only became more controversial by the day.  

Ravello Goods was tasked with creating a new campaign to appeal to the students on campus, and so the first place she visited was the student senate. After a conversation with the fall ‘24 senators, Dorothy Reily, now the senate’s secretary, suggested that Ravello Goods meet with the affinity organizations on campus to get a better litmus test of student life on campus. 

In the spring semester, Ravello Goods began her tour around campus to the affinity organizations and a few other clubs. Ravello Goods met with the Multicultural Students Union, the Black Students’ Association, the Sexuality and Gender Alliance, the Neurodiverse Network, and many more clubs to listen to students’ opinions on the Racism Stops With Me campaign. From hour-long conversations, Ravello Goods was able to glean a few potent themes that she shared with the student senators.  

Following those conversations, Ravello Goods put together a campaign that she is calling Community Starts with Me, Thrives with Us. She says, “the reason why it’s named Thrives with us is because in [the University’s] institutional priorities, we name a thriving community as one of our priorities. So it just seemed like there was a lot of alignment with that.”

She continues to outline the elements featured in the new campaign, “So there are many aspects to this new campaign I want to propose, for example, a symposium. I want to do training and development for faculty and staff, which also came up as a theme. I want to look at things like data and the way we use data to actually inform practice. So there’s those things, but the thing that I want to lift up for the student leaders is something I am calling the Community Bridge Builders Fund.”

The Community Bridge Builders Fund is a fund that will allow Ravello Goods and SPLO to fund six projects that are created as a partnership between two university organizations. These organizations will design and communicate ways to build a bridge between themselves to strengthen a disparate bond on campus. These projects might take the shape of an event, a workshop, an initiative, or other forms. The projects need to focus on three broad categories. The first one is meaningful community connections, which highlights inclusive care and creating bonds between clubs that have little to no interaction. The second category is inclusive care, which highlights unresolved elements from the previous campaign in wanting to foster a safer campus. Finally, the third category is cultivating learning growth and development. The shape and goals of the projects remain so broad because Ravello Goods wants to incorporate an element that students felt was not in the previous campaign: student voices. The fund has $6000 in total, and the projects can earn up to $600 in rewards.

Ravello Goods highlighted that this grant is not just for SPLO clubs; it is available for any student organization on campus. This means that previously unavailable organizations for hosting events due to SPLOs rules, like club sports or athletic teams, are able to participate in this project.
In addition to the campaign, Ravello Goods spoke about her meetings with the Neurodiverse Network and other student groups facing problems with accessibility on campus. Students with disabilities still suffer from the fact that their professors don’t acknowledge their accessibility measures in the classroom. Ravello Goods noted that students talked about a lack of privacy around their disabilities, with professors calling students “special” or not attempting to be discreet about the accessibility process. Ravello Goods also highlighted that for students with physical disabilities, the University remains a challenge, with cases like the lower common doors being heavy and the handicap buttons not working.

Connecting not only to the issues faced by students with a disability but also with all marginalized groups on campus, Ravello Goods talked about how there was a very frequent use of slurs on the campus. Quinn Dwyer, a student senator and Resident Assistant (RA), asked Ravello Goods if there was any way for RAs could help mitigate the slur usage on campus and create safer environments within the residence halls. Ravello Goods noted that RAs could continue to file incident reporting forms, as those allow the university to know where the issues are on campus. Ravello Goods also highlighted that last year, when she was making her rounds to the student clubs and listening to their complaints about safety, there were significantly fewer incident reports filed as compared to this semester.

After Ravello Goods left, the student senate voted on a few bills. The first bill promoted Senator Michael Jones to the new Student Life Council Chair, and the second introduced Lily Sawyer as the new Director of Communications for the student senate.

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