From the Road - Diversity Abroad Conference

The Diversity Abroad 7th Annual Conference, "Equity & Opportunity Through Inclusive Global Education", took place in Boston on March 2-5. This year, Arcadia's Chanae Brown, program manager, and member of Arcadia's Diversity Task Force was in attendance. Here are her thoughts on her takeaways from this motivating and inspiring gathering.

This year, the Diversity Abroad Annual conference was held at the Boston Park Plaza from March 2-5, 2019 and I had the great honor of attending for all three days. As their website states, Diversity Abroad’s mission is to "create equitable access to the benefits of global education by empowering educators, engaging stakeholders, and connecting diverse students to resources and opportunity” and I felt that mission statement throughout the entire event. This year, the conference had over 700 attendees from professionals to student leaders, and I found it to be a great learning experience for such a short amount of time.

While sessions at any conference are full of great conversation and case studies, the attendees at Diversity Abroad were particularly engaged and represented a wide variety of backgrounds from small Minority Serving Institutions to large universities to new, up-and-coming study abroad providers.

After attending a few sessions, I found myself running into some of the same people and we were able to easily strike up a conversation about our own experience in the field of study abroad. Regardless of where I was in the near vicinity of the venue, I met many of our university partners and members from The Guild, as well as a few familiar faces, such as our colleagues from Education New Zealand.

The CEO and Founder of Diversity Abroad, Andrew Gordon, was also very visible throughout the weekend and made sure to introduce himself at every encounter. A few of my favorite sessions were “Finding Wakanda: Deploying Innovative Themes to Attract Diverse Students Abroad”, “Technology for Inclusion in Global Education: Pitfalls & Opportunities”, “Young International Educators, Students, and Intersectional Identities: Who Supports Who?” and a smaller session designed to explain the benefits of being a member of the Diversity Abroad Network. Over these next few weeks, Diversity Abroad intends on rolling out a new web presence that I think will be a great asset as we further understand and develop our partnership with them.

While this was my very first time attending the Diversity Abroad Conference, I found it very easy to navigate, and I appreciate the amount of effort that went into creating a conference designed for discussion on such important issues. My biggest takeaway is that even at conferences such as these, everyone in the field of study abroad has a lot of work to do and that many of us are up to the task. In the hallways and at the nearby Starbucks, everyone was knee-deep in conversations on best practices, and I found myself more inspired than ever to further our efforts at Arcadia.

I think that my attendance spoke volumes about our increasing commitment to diversity, access, and inclusion, and I look forward to contributing to and furthering the many innovative discussions and ideas we are having at Arcadia to promote and encourage diversity and inclusion in our study abroad programs and approach.