Coming up: Stay tuned for our next community meeting in Fall 2025 by joining the ME-IDEA slack channel! Location and time will be updated in early Fall.

ME-IDEA (formerly MESAR) holds quarterly community meetings for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as department faculty and staff, to build community and discuss concepts related to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Any ME student, faculty, or staff can sign up to lead a community meeting. Topics that have been previously covered in our community meetings include: structural racism, equitable teaching pedagogies, intersectionality, microaggressions, racial capitalism, promoting welcoming and inclusive spaces, and unconscious bias. As of November 2024, ME-IDEA has held 17 community meetings on topics include:

• Structural racism (August 2020)

• Systemic racism (October 2020)

• Equitable teaching pedagogies 

• Intersectionality and microaggressions

• Racial capitalism (January 2021)

• Class privilege (June 2021)

• Identity capitalism (November 2021)

• Creating inclusive labs and clubs (December 2021)

• Understanding patriarchy (February 2022)

• Decriminalize UW (June 2022)

• Challenges faced by international students (December 2022)

• Unconscious bias (May 2023)

• Lessons from plants: academic wellbeing (November 2023)

• Green colonialism and engineering ethics (March 2024)

• Introduction to research (November 2024)

Here are a list of UW campus organizations and programs that have collaborated with ME-IDEA community meetings:

• Empowering Prevention & Inclusive Communities (EPIC) training

• Robin Clayton from UW Office of Inclusive Excellence 

• UW Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Action Planning

• UW Molecular Engineering (MolE) diversity, equity, and inclusion committee

Fill out this form if you would like to lead a community meeting. Any ME student, faculty, or staff are welcome to lead a community meeting. Community meetings are usually formatted (but do not have to be) to have 1) a form of media discussing a topic related to inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility through articles/podcasts/videos/presentations followed by 2) a time for all attendees to discuss the topic in smaller groups.