By Emma Quirk ’26
Features and Photos Editor
Several Mount Holyoke College staff members and one student (me) were invited to attend the virtual Institute on Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation Campus Centers: “Expanding TRHT Campus Centers to Dismantle Hierarchies of Human Value and Build Equitable Communities” during the week of June 27.
As a student fellow in the College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and a member of the TRHT team, I was given the opportunity to attend the TRHT Institute. It was powerful to be able to converse with the TRHT mentors and fellow participants who are committed to DEI-related work in their own communities.
Named a TRHT Center in 2022, this is the first year the College has attended the Institute as an official Center. The College’s official designation as a Center was covered last February in a previous article by Mount Holyoke News.
This year, the Institute hosted over 450 participants, with 20 mentors and other facilitators to guide the programming. Held on June 27, the first live session commenced with a welcome by Tia Brown McNair, Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Student Success and Executive Director for the TRHT Campus Centers. Following the opening, Lynn Pasquerella ‘80, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Mount Holyoke College’s 18th president, and Gail Christopher, founder of the Ntianu Center for Healing and Nature and Executive Director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity, led a plenary discussion on the topic “Finding Our Common Humanity.”
AAC&U runs the TRHT Institute and partners with colleges and universities like Mount Holyoke to “promote racial healing and to catalyze efforts to address current inequities grounded in notions of a racial hierarchy,” according to their website. The TRHT Campus Center initiative “seeks to address the historical and contemporary impacts of race and racism within our communities” through community action and healing.
There are five core pieces of the TRHT framework: narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, separation, law and economy. At the Institute, participants could see these components in action with the help of mentors. Each campus team — composed of faculty, staff and students from the same university — was assigned a mentor who leads a current TRHT Campus Center. Wendy Sherman Heckler, Provost at Otterbein University, was Mount Holyoke’s team mentor.
Participants were exposed to the scope and potential of the TRHT mission by engaging in Rx Racial Healing® Circles and workshops. They examined the current state and historical reasoning behind race relations in their communities, developed action plans to execute at their home institution and prepared to facilitate racial healing activities. These webinars were led by different mentors throughout the week, allowing participants to collaborate with and receive guidance from various sources.
One of the sessions that Jonencia Rivera Wood, Assistant Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at MHC and member of the TRHT team, chose to attend was “Targeted Support for Faculty and Staff Using the TRHT Framework.”
“Using the TRHT framework as a guide, this session engaged faculty and staff and offer space to delve into real-world situations and solutions for better student outcomes,” Rivera Wood said. “[The session] focused on providing tangible best practices for… addressing Accessibility, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging matters that come up in classroom discussions, curriculum needs, paradigm shifts, and beyond.”
Rivera Wood told MHN that she also acquired some personal takeaways from attending this workshop.
“I was able to gain more understanding of how we could develop and integrate the TRHT framework here at Mount Holyoke that feels authentic to our unique community,” the Vice President said.”
For me, the most impactful session was the Rx Racial Healing® Circle. My facilitators were Cynthia Neal Spence, Social Justice Fellows Program Director and UNCF/Mellon Programs Director, and an Associate Professor and co-chair of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College, and Nathan Carter, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer at Northern Virginia Community College.
“You must enter conversations, all the time but especially during a healing circle, with love and compassion,” Spence said at the start of the Circle.
She and Carter then read Maya Angelou’s 1999 poem “Human Family” aloud, setting the tone of the meeting.
The poem ends with the lines “I note the obvious differences / between each sort and type, / but we are more alike, my friends, / than we are unalike. / We are more alike, my friends, / than we are unalike. / We are more alike, my friends, / than we are unalike.”
Throughout the 2 hours and 45 minute session, there were several whole group discussions and dyad discussions in breakout rooms. I admired the candor of the other participants and appreciated the opportunity to speak with different people.
Toward the end of the Circle, Spence and Carter reiterated the importance of community and conversation in the fight for racial justice.
“Racial healing is about the people’s work that leads to systemic change,” Carter said.
Leaving the Circle, I felt a sense of hope for the future, and immense gratitude for those who have fought to create spaces where people can learn and to listen. I was inspired by the stories and experiences of my fellow participants, and felt a great sense of belonging as well as a responsibility to share the TRHT message by working for change.
By becoming a TRHT Center and attending the Institute, MHC is working to right past wrongs and become a more welcoming community.
“There are many things that I am looking forward to about MHC being a TRHT Center, however, the one that comes immediately to mind is creating change that is felt across our campus,” Rivera Wood said. “A change that fosters a full sense of belonging here by students, staff, faculty, alums and visitors through our policies, ethos and praxis.”