Who is in charge of the project?

Professor Eva Witesman – eva_witesman@byu.edu.

The project is overseen by Eva and two Marriott School of Business alumni and Ballard Center staff – Jill Piacitelli (jill.piacitelli@byu.edu) and Alyssa Clark (alyssac.647@gmail.com). The work of organizing the database, finding resources, and writing the digests has largely been done by a group of 20 student volunteers working in small teams.

What are the project goals?

1) Promote and support antiracist actions at BYU to create a more inclusive, loving, safe, Christlike, Zion campus . This is our primary goal. All other goals and actions are second to this.

2) Gather and widely share ideas for antiracist actions that are unique to BYU. By engaging in a decentralized, grassroots effort, we hope to get contributions and buy-in for antiracist efforts from as many people on campus as possible. By example, we want to demonstrate that every person on campus has an opportunity to improve on this front. We can share our best work and efforts, see the work and efforts of others, and strive to improve by adopting ever-better examples and ideas. The grassroots element of our effort is intended to break down barriers that might otherwise prevent us from doing and giving our best in this area. We can learn quickly from the ideas and examples of others, and turn around and contribute our own work as well.

3) Reduce burden on campus experts. Many of the people on campus who have already been actively fighting racism actively have been inundated with requests for materials and information. We want to get this material shared as widely and as quickly as possible while providing a trusted resource that can reduce the flow of traffic to specific faculty members whose inboxes have become inundated with requests. If we can share their materials widely, we can reduce the burden on them and free them to continue moving their work forward rather than having to respond to an unending stream of emails.

How is the material being gathered?

To achieve all of this, we have invited materials from people on campus through targeted invitations, and using snowball sampling. We have created a Qualtrics intake form (bit.ly/byuantiracism) to make submission easy and orderly. We have a volunteer group of more than 30 students and alumni who are coding and lightly vetting the materials, and creating research digests to share out with the BYU community. They also created a shared gmail account (antiracismdb@gmail.com) because they found that many people wanted to just email materials rather than using our online form. This team of volunteers is managed by Eva Witesman and two members of the Ballard Center team.

What are the intended outputs?

1) A searchable database of antiracist materials that are uniquely tied to BYU either because they were produced here, produced by the church or its members and employees more broadly, or because it was recommended by members of our immediate community. This database will be housed by the HBLL, with whom we already have a partnership. The database will go through a few iterations (its final form will take too much time and we need to get these materials out quickly) but most iterations should be searchable and filterable by several codes that can help members of the BYU community find the specific types of resources they are looking for. This will be a living database, with additional resources added in close to real-time.

2) Research digests that share the best of what we have learned from the resources provided. These are organized by topic and shared with the intent of quickly providing actionable thoughts and practices with our community, in addition to links to the most applicable and useful resources from the database. These, too, will be living documents and we will do our best to create new ones as demand for specific information arises.

As of October 6, 2020, four of the ten digests have been released:

Digest 1 | ‘All are Alike Unto God’: Creating a Zion campus by addressing racism, promoting equity, and enhancing belonging Released Aug 26, 2020.

Digest 2 | ‘Lend an ear unto my counsel’: Addressing challenging topics from a perspective of faith

Digest 3 | ‘Lord, Is it I?’ Examining ourselves on issues of race Released Oct 6, 2020.

Digest 4 | 'Let Us Take Counsel Together' | Supporting and listening to those with lived experience Released Oct 6, 2020.

Digest 5 | ‘Do good continually’: Improving our words and actions

Digest 6 | ‘Their hearts knit together in unity’: Having conversations about race

Digest 7 | ‘Speak one with another’: Hosting Class discussions on race

Digest 8 | ‘Bless them that curse you’: What to do if someone makes a racist comment

Digest 9 | “Teach us of his ways”: Creating an anti-racist syllabus Released Aug 26, 2020.

Digest 10 | ‘Obtain a knowledge of history’: Race and the history of the church

Is your project aligned with the BYU Committee on Race, Equity and Belonging?

This is a grassroots effort to gather materials of particular relevance to the BYU community to aid in our antiracist efforts on campus. Though the BYU Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging is aware of our work, we are not directed by them and are working independently. One member of that committee has suggested that our efforts might plug in nicely with their effort to provide resources to the BYU community. Right now they have a resources page (located here: https://race.byu.edu/resources) and our effort might be able to provide additional materials, ideas, and searchability to this page. That is currently the extent of our connection with the committee. Yes, our efforts are aligned, but to be clear, we are presently neither directed nor officially connected with them in any formal way. This may change in the future--once we have our database up and running, as it may make sense to hand over formal responsibility or oversight of our work to that committee. Right now we are trying to support their work without adding administrative burden to their work. Maintaining independence seems the best way to do this.

We are also doing our best to coordinate with many other efforts on campus, many of which also include the gathering and sharing of resources.

Will the submitted materials be secure?

We will work to make sure that materials are shared in a manner that protects copyright and prevents editing. The purpose of the database is to make materials widely available to the campus community, however, so submitters should be aware that their material will be shared with others. People should submit materials with the expectation that others may follow their example, including possible use of similar wording or structure (such as statements on syllabi) or may provide their works as readings (such as research papers or essays). We will do our best, working with the library, to identify potential issues before they are a problem (such as linking to published materials from databases rather than via pdf to protect against copyright infringement, for example). However, we cannot foresee all possible issues and are committed to continuous improvement. If you see an issue or question regarding material security that we may not yet be aware of, please let us know so we can be certain to protect the interests of all.

Is the project valid?

As valid as we are capable of making it, yes! Eva Witesman is a full-time CFS professor in the BYU College of Business and you can find her profile here: https://marriottschool.byu.edu/directory/details?id=5430. She runs two different learn-do-become inspiring learning initiatives (the Virtuous Organizations Initiative and BYU GoodMeasure), and is the senior co-chair of the Faculty Advisory Council. AVP Shane Reese was contacted by Eva when the efforts began, and we have done our best to learn from and communicate with key members of our campus community along the way. Contacts at the HBLL have been incredibly supportive and helpful in providing guidance as we move forward.

Eva re: about the project origins: “I was praying about what I could do on campus to help with our efforts to reduce racism and improve the campus climate for our Black students and employees and other persons of color. This was my answer. So I am moving forward with faith, using my skills and resources to the best of my ability.”

Who are the potential users?

Our primary target audience at this point is BYU faculty. We hope to expand to include administrative and staff information as well. We are already gathering ideas and materials from people in administrative and staff roles, but we see our greatest short term impact being through faculty. Once fall semester is underway, we will produce digests from a more staff and administration perspective. Ultimately, we hope that our resources will benefit the entire campus community. That is our target audience: BYU. We can imagine our work being of value to other CES schools as well, and possibly other institutions. But our goal really is to focus on the ways in which we can speak specifically to our gospel-centered BYU audience.

What is the scope of the project?

Any and all ideas, resources, and actions that can be taken on the BYU campus to make campus more inclusive and eradicate racist actions and attitudes is our scope. We are spending a great deal of time and resources with coding of the materials that come in so that people can use the database to meet their specific needs and scope the materials as they see fit. By applying filters through the database, we hope that our campus community can find what they are looking for in our database, and continually contribute to the effort by expanding the database to include newer and more updated materials especially as our standards of practice improve. Like any library database, the scope of the database itself is intended to be broad, though we hope to make it valuable for narrow uses. For example, someone writing a syllabus, looking for materials on how to effectively host conversations about race, or looking for relevant scriptures or general conference talks should be able to filter materials specifically for those purposes.

What are the long term plans for the gathered materials?

Gathering them in a filterable, carefully coded database that is open to the BYU community (and therefore to some extent open to the general public). Using materials to provide ideas and practices through research digests to the campus community.

How long will the project last?

This initiative was intended to be short-term with very clear and usable outputs. Volunteers made a commitment to contribute 3-5 hours for 5 weeks. As the project has progressed, various extensions of the work and spinoff projects are being considered for a Phase 2, intending to last from September - December 2020.