Office of Diversity and Inclusion

Our office undertakes many initiatives each year, including:

• Collaboration with academic departments to support strategies for nurturing inclusive and pluralistic communities, diverse across every dimension.

• Professional development, including leadership workshops. 

• Regular convenings of our Bias Response Team. 

• Learning programs to help community leaders across Boston implement a public health lens into their organizational activities. 

• Summer research programs intended to introduce undergraduate students to the public health profession and research. 

• Voluntary unconscious bias training for student application reviewers, faculty search committees, and staff hiring managers who choose to take it.

• Annual Yerby and Hopkins lectures to raise awareness of public health issues among historically marginalized populations. 

• The Dean’s Advisory Committee for Diversity and Inclusion, which includes members from across the School. 

• The LGBTQIA+ Working Group, a collective of students, staff, and faculty who aim to advise School leadership on supporting the needs of LGBTQIA+ identified members of the Harvard Chan School community. 

• The Health Equity and Leadership Conference, a student-led initiative sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.  

• Engagement with Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery report, including multiple community forums to grapple with the report’s findings and approaches to engaging with Black and Indigenous descendant communities. 

Together with our community, we have laid out three active principles for our work: 
 
Stride forward courageously 

• We will promote opportunities for all community members to learn and grow, gaining the capacity for constructive communication across differences as well as the skills to address barriers and biases that may divide or marginalize us. 

• We will nurture in community members the lifelong commitment to  promote pluralism, inclusion, belonging, and diversity across many dimensions in both their personal and professional endeavors. 

Actively foster a culture of belonging 

• We commit to understanding contemporary injustice in the context of its historical origins, which include legacies of indigenous exploitation, slavery, gender discrimination, religious discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and colonialism. 

• We actively denounce all forms of oppression and discrimination and the harms perpetuated by such practices at individual, institutional, and structural levels. 

Commit to excellence in scientific and academic pursuits 

• We will cultivate an environment where students from all backgrounds and identities, and with a diversity of perspectives and ideas, are valued, affirmed, and supported in their educational and scholarly pursuits. 

• We commit to championing equity in our pedagogical and research practices to increase opportunities for inclusive scholarship, thought leadership, and public health practice and to address bias and oppression—such as racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia,  and marginalization—as global public health imperatives.