Community Outreach, Inclusive Excellence

September 2021

Last year, our campus appointed Regina Richards, PhD, MSW, to lead a newly formed Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement* for the CU Anschutz Medical Campus. We realized there are many ways in which we have unfortunately failed to equally support our community members, and Dr. Richards hit the ground running by approaching these challenges through thoughtful listening and collaborative problem-solving. Thanks to significant institutional and philanthropic support, Dr. Richards and her team have made considerable progress moving toward systemic change.

Benefactors and friends of the campus pivoted their support to areas where they saw the most need. This year alone, we launched five DEI-specific scholarship funds across our schools and college. One of these new scholarships, the ColoradoSPH Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Scholarship Fund, was generously founded by Dawn Comstock, PhD, and offers both need- and merit-based aid to attract excellent students from populations underrepresented in the school and in public health professions. Among those encouraged to apply, are students from races and ethnicities underrepresented in medicine, first-generation college students, those who identify as LGBTQ+, students with disabilities and those who have faced adversity.

We now have 73 funds dedicated to supporting Dr. Richards’ vision. Additionally, the CU Office of the President committed $1M in matching funds toward DEI initiatives, hoping to rally our supporters in pursuit of a shared goal. These meaningful gifts allowed Dr. Richards to strategically employ resources.

There is no shortage of work to be done, and we have a long way to go. Dr. Richards’ first step was listening and connecting with our local Aurora community to understand how we were failing to engage with those in our own backyard. Now, CU Anschutz supports more than 70 community engagement programs, and we are building more.

“I had to engage. I had to admit that we haven’t done everything right,” she said. “We had to ask, ‘How do we make the community feel like they belong."

If you ask Gabriela Jacobo, community connector for the Resident Leadership Council (RLC), we make the community feel like they belong by going out and asking what they need, and learning how we can leverage resources at CU Anschutz to help. The RLC, formerly known as the Campus-Community Partnership, was founded in 2013 and joined the CU Anschutz Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement in the summer of 2020. Jacobo leads a team of 24 resident leaders, many of whom are young adults fresh out of high school or undergraduates in the CU system. Resident leaders are tasked with getting to know their neighbors individually, so they can act as informed spokespeople for their communities and connect them with the right CU Anschutz experts and resources to tackle any problems they may face.

Now that the RLC is part of the CU Anschutz Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement, Jacobo and her team are more plugged in to the campus and the campus is better connected to the community. “Our residents are nonstop,” Jacobo said. “They want to be examples to their children and communities. We’re starting a new connection campaign now, and there’s no shortage of enthusiasm.”

While we worked to lean in and actively listen to our community, Dr. Richards knew that the campus needed infrastructure to support ongoing work in DEI. The Chancellor’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Engagement Leadership Council was developed this year, and they immediately convened to define areas of focus, outline goals, and develop action plans for reaching milestones.

CU Anschutz Fund for Excellence

To provide a flexible funding source to address CU Anschutz's most promising priorities in support of research, education and patient care.