Equity Advocates serve the campus community by actively contributing to institutional transformation by promoting and enhancing fairness, diversity, equity, and inclusiveness for all faculty and staff. Advocates work to ensure search and selection processes will be equitable to all candidates. Equity Advocates are members of the search committees who act as a process advisor to provide committees support and guidance at every stage of the process. Advocates help advance inclusive excellence by asking questions to help committee members. The equity advocate plays a vital role throughout the search processes including in screening, interviews, references, evaluation, and integration of the new faculty or staff member into the institution. 

Examine, explore, and reflect on their thinking, decisions, and processes. 

• Understand places where bias commonly occurs within a search. 

• Identify and promote practices that advance access, equity, and inclusion. 

• Minimize the impacts of cognitive and structural biases. 

What makes an Equity Advocate:

• An Equity Advocate possesses excellence listening and communication skills.  

• An Equity Advocate provides a rich networking opportunity for faculty and staff and is viewed as providing a highly valuable service. 

• An Equity Advocate is provided training and must commit to the position for at least one year.  

• Any full-time employee and faculty (Instructional, research, and clinical (IRC) faculty)

• Advocate is committed to advancing Inclusive Belonging at UCCS in alignment with the Inclusive Excellence & Belonging Action Plan. 

Time Commitment:

Advocates prepare for their responsibilities by attending required training and a yearly recertification, additional training is provided as needed. An Advocate serves on a yearly basis and will serve on at least one search during the year and can serve on additional searches based on capacity. Time commitments will vary but every effort should be made to keep responsibilities balanced among the pool of Equity Advocates.  

Training Requirements: 

Search Guidelines & Equitable Hiring Practices will focus on weaving equity into the hiring process: from job description review, search committee selection, and position distribution and marketing. 

Equity Advocate Training will focus on how to serve as the equity advocate on a search. This training will include bias mitigation tactics, overview of policy and protected classes, and scenarios.