Bryn Mawr College SAAC (Student-Athlete Advisory Committee)

Jackie Fernandez is a senior on the crew team & Co-Head of SAAC’s Diversity & Inclusion committee! Jackie works to grow our diversity & inclusion initiatives not only within SAAC, but throughout all teams, and the Bryn Mawr community I am SAAC co-head of Diversity and Inclusion. I feel that it is very important for student-athletes to have a say in the programing and D,E,&I initiatives presented by the department. With this reasoning, all the teams now have one D,E,&I R...ep who works closely with us to take action on campus, hold all teams responsible, and learn from each other. In addition, my co-head and I consolidated all of the school's wonderful resources into one document which have been distributed to coaches and teams to ensure that everyone is aware of the support on campus even if it may not pertain to them. We also established a long-lasting partnership with the Pensby Center to host workshops throughout the year where athletes learn more about racism in all aspects of life and what actions they can take. Awesome work Jackie, can’t wait to see what D&I comes up with next!

Emily Darrow is a senior on the cross country team! Emily is part of the leadership team for cross country & has been encouraging diversity & inclusion conversations within her team The leadership team for xc and track have been facilitating a biweekly conversation about the issue of diversity and inclusion during our 90 minute practice block. The team has really devoted their time and energy into working through discomfort of conversations about experiences and missteps... with diversity in order to see how it impacts our daily lives and how we can become more aware of these issues on a daily basis. Prior discussions have focused on allyship, microaggressions and more closely ways that inequality takes place in our communities at Bryn Mawr. We are hoping to include conversations about issues of diversity in the history of our sport and program so that we can understand what steps we can take as athletes to combat racist issues. I’m really happy with the efforts our team and coaches have put into this work and I’m really proud to captain a team that is willing to put in the work to learn and grow not only as athletes but as people as well. We love to see it Emily! We’re proud of all your efforts here at Bryn Mawr!

Alina Peon is a junior on the field hockey team & Co-Head of our SAAC’s Diversity & Inclusion committee! Alina works to promote diversity & inclusion on Bryn Mawr’s campus & within our athletic community Alongside my amazing friend and Co-Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Jackie Fernandez, I work to promote diversity, equity and inclusion on campus, in athletics and in our Conference by fighting to raise people's voices. As an athlete and person of color myself, my work af...fects me on a daily basis as I have seen both the negatives and the positives of being a BiPOC athlete within my sport and the Centennial Conference. Jackie and I work hard and to the best of our ability to target every sector of D&I work on campus. Since our start of the year in SAAC, we have set the first ever D&I expectations for teams and held team captain meetings - we prioritize D&I over competitive values, and we fight to win while being the best we can in respecting and protecting diversity, equity and inclusion. In addition, we have launched a campaign to make D&I a priority by creating the first SAAC Team D&I Rep position, which allows us to constantly gather feedback and mentor teams in their diversity and inclusion efforts. We have worked to promote the mental health, interfaith, COVID-19 copying experience on and off campus and on and off our community through fundraising. One of our proudest achievements is the on-going work we are doing to create a bias report system exclusive to athletics to protect our athletes, gather feedback to keep our work relevant and to educate ourselves on what is working or not for our community. We do not just aim at increasing a diversity percentage, we want to protect our BiPOC athletes today, tomorrow and in years to come, welcome BiPOC athletes to our athletics community and continue to set the standard in our respective sports, communities and within the Centennial Conference. Thank you for all your hard work Alina, keep it up!

First up for today’s My Story Matters series is Elicie Edmond! Elicie is a senior on the lacrosse team. We’ve chosen to highlight Elicie and work with Hanna Holborn Gray Fellowship. Elicie’s project focus was Deconstructing Voluntourism & Community Engagement in Contexts of Inequality My summer research explored cultural and ethical competency awareness from college students who undergo acts of service in "underrepresented" communities. I centered my research on cult...ural and ethical competency awareness from students in the Bi-Co. I wanted to understand ways Bi-Co students were thinking critically about their positionalities, such as, race, class, gender, etc while being affiliated with affluent institutions when volunteering at organizations that primarily serve "underrepresented" communities- e.g. low income Black and 'brown' populations. Saviorism is alive and well today. We, as college students, can be complicit in perpetuating this reductive act when partaking in volunteer opportunities. Just as it is imperative to partake in these humanitarian efforts we must think critically about what it means for us to enter these spaces with the intentions to "do good". Given the growing need to implement an anti-racist society, we must not conflict our solidarity with saviorism. Big shout out to Elicie for her important work! Stay tuned to see more from our student-athletes as part of SAAC’s Diversity & Inclusion Social Media Campaign this week! #ncaainclusion #ncaainclusionweek #mystorymatters

Hi Athletes! Tomorrow night is our second Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion workshop with the Pensby Center! We will revisit our last topic, racism and white privilege, and will discuss effective allyship. Please read over the White Supremacy Culture document and reflect: Which of these behaviors have I seen at BMC? In athletics? In my sport? On my team?Which do I engage in myself?Where can I begin to practice antidotes?