Cultivating Community Workshops 2025-26

On this page

Upcoming Fall 2025 Workshops:

Winter 2026 Workshops:

Please expect more workshops in Spring of 2026!

Cultivating Community: Foundations of Inclusive Excellence

This series provides a foundational understanding of identity, belonging, power, and equity in higher education and beyond. Through interactive discussions and skill-building activities, participants move from awareness of identity and belonging, to courage in confronting power and systemic inequities, to empowerment through allyship and restorative practices. Each session equips participants with practical tools for reflection, dialogue, and action to foster more inclusive and equitable communities at UC Irvine. 

Attendees who participate in five of the six workshops over a two-year period (2024-2026) will be eligible to receive a certificate of completion.

Part 1: Awareness

  1. Beyond the Surface: Exploring Social Identities
    This workshop introduces key concepts related to individual and group identity formation and explores how intersecting identities and social positions shape our worldviews, life experiences, and interactions. Participants will develop a deeper understanding of their own and others’ identities, enhancing skills for critical self-reflection and thoughtful engagement across differences.
  2. A Place for All: Fostering Belonging- REGISTER for Jan 15, 3-4:30 p.m. via Zoom
    This workshop explores the essential role that a sense of belonging plays in student and employee success and well-being. It examines the harmful impacts of microaggressions and other acts of exclusion and offers concrete tools for fostering a sense of belonging and building inclusive communities of care where everyone is welcomed, valued, and respected.

Part 2: Courage

  1. Engaging Equity: Navigating Power and Privilege- REGISTER for Feb 9, 10-11:30 a.m. via Zoom
    This workshop explores how power and privilege operate on personal, interpersonal, social, and institutional levels. Through collaborative discussion and grounded reflection, participants will strengthen their understanding of the multidimensional aspects of power. They will learn to recognize and interrogate privilege and marginalization and identify strategies for disrupting the foundations of inequity.
  2. Bending Toward Justice: Confronting Systemic Oppression- REGISTER for Feb 27, 10-11:30 a.m. via Zoom
    This workshop examines deeply rooted causes of injustice. Using a trauma-informed approach, participants will explore historical and contemporary dynamics of oppressive systems like racism, classism, heterosexism, and ableism. They will learn to recognize structural barriers at work in higher education and identify policies and practices that confront systemic oppression.

 

Part 3: Empowerment

  1. Standing Together: Allyship in Action
    This workshop explores the roles of allies and accomplices in advocating for marginalized communities and challenging systems of oppression. Through collaborative discussion of specific scenarios, participants will advance their understanding of the process and components of effective allyship and enhance their capacity to stand with and for others at UCI and beyond.
  2. Circles of Change: Building Restorative Practices
    This workshop will give participants the foundational knowledge/theory of restorative justice and practices. The session will also include restorative communication tools (i.e. restorative questions) and an experiential circle process. The goals of the workshops include: defining and understanding restorative justice and practices, understanding foundational and basic everyday practices of restorative justice, and expand upon knowledge of restorative justice with deeper exploration of harms and conflict intervention through restorative communication tools.