Gaylord Ambassadors Establish Diversity and Inclusion Committee
By Chelsey Kraft
Even though this year looks different, the Gaylord Ambassadors are representing the college well and have even implemented some changes, including establishing a diversity and inclusion committee and creating new student leadership positions.
In the past, Gaylord Ambassadors have had three pillars of focus: recruitment, current student engagement and alumni. Under these areas, the Ambassadors give prospective students tours of the building, interact with alumni at various functions and host events such as a creative showcase to allow professional writing and creative media production students to read a chapter from the book they’re writing or show a commercial they created.
While connecting with alumni is still very important to the Gaylord Ambassadors, chair Lauren Szmutko explained that they wanted to shift efforts to a student-led diversity and inclusion committee. The organizations will continue to work with Lee Reynolds, director of development and alumni relations, on those alumni efforts as opposed to having a specific group of students dedicated to that area.
“For this committee, there have been a thousand and one different ideas of how it’s going to look,” Szmutko said. “Honestly how it looks this year or this semester may be different from how it looks next year or next semester.”
The first initiative launched by the committee is a diversity and inclusion series, which will last throughout this semester and next and will be open to all Gaylord College students. The fall 2020 sessions are being held via Zoom, and Dr. Belinda Hyppolite, OU’s vice president of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, kicked off the series on Oct. 26. After she spoke about diversity and inclusion, the Ambassadors led a discussion. Szmutko said future sessions will focus on topics such as disabilities and inclusion one month and LGBTQ+ inclusion another.
“It’s funneling diversity and inclusion down into smaller chunks so people can take the time to actually learn about it and ask those questions,” Szmutko said. “We’re hoping that this is going to give students a little bit more voice in the fact that diversity and inclusion is something that is very big and it’s something that a lot of people are afraid to talk about just because they’re afraid they’re going to misstep. We’re hoping that this is just going to allow people to facilitate those conversations and feel comfortable having those conversations.”
Another change in the Gaylord Ambassadors structure is the creation of more student leadership positions beyond just chair and vice chair. Szmutko said that in the past, the leadership had noticed several students who were constantly stepping up and essentially serving as another chair. Thus, the organization decided to add directors to each of the three committees to provide additional leadership opportunities.
This year, 35 students serve as Gaylord Ambassadors, a slightly larger number than in the past. Szmutko said this was because there were several May 2020 graduates in the group, so adding a few seniors as Ambassadors this year was a way to help continue the strong foundation for the organization and keep up momentum.
