All students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to register for the 21-Day Equity Challenge, a program launched by United Way of Central Iowa and several partner organizations to help the greater Des Moines community develop a deeper understanding of how inequity and racism affect our lives.
After registering online, participants will receive an email each weekday, from Oct. 5 through Nov. 2, with readings, videos, podcasts, and ways to take action. Each day will feature a different topic, and participants will be challenged to partake in at least one of the four or five pieces of content they receive.
Participation is free and registrants can participate solo or as a part of a group. Topics will include understanding privilege, housing and redlining, justice system inequities, allyship, and many more. The content for each topic has been curated by an advisory committee of local experts and leaders on racism and equity issues in our community. Drake is a supporting organization of the 21-Day Equity Challenge and hopes all campus community members will partake in this shared learning opportunity.
— Erin Lain, Associate Provost, Campus Equity & Inclusion
This Q&A is part of the story series Voices of Drake that highlights the diversity, ambition, and passion of the incredible people who make up our campus community. This week’s story is designed to celebrate and shine light on Latinx Heritage Month, Sept. 15–Oct. 15. It spotlights Marina Verlengia, director of new student and parent programs.
Tell us a little about yourself. I am a first generation American, born and raised in south Florida. My parents came to the U.S. from Venezuela to go to college and always planned to return home after graduation. My dad received a good job opportunity so they kept extending their time here. Eventually they had children and settled down in south Florida. I am the oldest of four. Growing up, we only spoke Spanish in our home and spent our summers in Venezuela visiting our extended family. For a long time, my parents were the only ones living in the U.S. Over time and as things have gotten worse in Venezuela, we have started to have more family members move to Florida.
Tell us about your education. Where did you go to school and what did you study? I went to the University of Central Florida for both undergraduate and graduate school. I got my undergraduate degree in marketing and have two master’s in Business Administration and Sports Business Management.
How long have you been in the Drake campus community? What is your role at Drake? It is hard to believe, but I have been at Drake almost six years. I am the director of new student and parent programs.
You are the organizer for Drake’s Latinx Faculty/Staff Affinity Group. What is that and how has it been important to you in your time at Drake? The Latinx affinity group is a space for Latinx faculty/staff to get to know one another socially and provide support for each other. There aren’t many Latinx faculty or staff on campus so it has been really nice to connect with areas across campus and meet other Latinx faculty and staff. Prior to this group, I didn’t really know many other Latinx staff or faculty.
These aren’t normal times, but in normal times, what kinds of things does the Latinx Affinity Group do? We have created a great partnership with La Fuerza Latina student organization and did a few get togethers with these students in La Casa. It has been a great way for students to also connect to Latinx faculty and staff. One of our gatherings was a potluck in which people brought traditional Latin dishes to share. We enjoyed great food and conversation!
How long have you been at Drake? What is your favorite thing about working at Drake so far? I have been at Drake almost six years. I love working with students and introducing them to our community. We have a really amazing, supportive community. We really do have an “all in this together” spirit. I feel a lot of support from my colleagues, everyone is always willing to lend a helping hand.
What is your favorite thing about the Drake neighborhood? I love walking in the Drake neighborhood. Since my start at Drake, I have always enjoyed walks in the neighborhood. When on campus, I try to go out during the lunch hour a few times a week.
Who has been the biggest influence in your life and what lessons did that person teach you? My parents—they came to this country not knowing anyone or speaking the language for a better education. They created an amazing life for themselves and their children. Our culture and heritage were always a huge part of our lives. They made sure we knew the language, music, food, traditions, and that we were proud of it. They faced a lot of challenges and adversity along the way but always put family first. I appreciate everything they did for us and the opportunities provided to us because they moved to the U.S.
How do you like to spend your free-time? Tell us about your hobbies and interests. During normal times, I love to travel! I love spending time with friends and family, going for bike rides on the local bike trails, going for walks, binge watching a good tv show, and have come to really enjoy puzzles this year.
This year is a year like no other. What advice would you like to give to a first-year student at Drake? During our Welcome to the Team event during Welcome Week, Coach Jennie Baranczyk gave a great speech with a special message that stuck with me. She spoke about being thankful for what we have this year and what we are able to do. It is so easy to focus on everything that has been taken away from us and all the things we can’t do in 2020. It is important to also think about everything we can do and to be thankful to be part of this great community. Things will get better and slowly we will return to normal. We are all in this together!
The 2020 United Way of Central Iowa Campaign will be held next week—mark your calendars and watch your email for more information! There will not be an in-person kick-off event this year, nor will we have campaign captains. However, your philanthropic donations are needed this year more than ever to provide relief to those left most vulnerable by the pandemic. If you are able, please consider making a contribution.
The Office of Equity and Inclusion has decided to postpone the Campus Climate Town Halls, originally set for Oct. 8 and 9, to a later date this fall. The Equity and Inclusion team is expecting to receive comparison data from other colleges and universities in the coming weeks. Therefore, the decision was made to hold the town halls after this information has been received. A new date for the town halls will be shared as soon as possible.
Drake University Law School earned an A+ ranking for family and child law in preLaw magazine, placing Drake among the top four law schools in the nation for this field. This is the third year in a row that Drake Law received recognition for excellence in family law.
The publication based the rankings on law schools’ offerings in family law, including clinical programs, certificates, externships, and courses. The results are reported in preLaw’s Back to School 2020 issue.
The issue highlights an effort led by 2020 alumna Kerrigan Owens and Drake Law’s Director of Clinics and Experiential Education Suzie Pritchett, which established a pop-up clinic for young mothers at the Young Women’s Resource Center in Des Moines. The nonprofit organization supports, educates, and advocates for girls and young women ages 10 to 21. The clinic, staffed entirely by Drake Law students, performed intake services which included issues such as custody and domestic violence, and then forwarded the cases to the Polk County Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project.
The Law School’s curricular and clinical programs are the foundation for projects like the pop-up clinic. “Students perform practical exercises in their substantive classes, and our close connections with the bar, the courts, the legislature, and non-profit groups enrich the student experience and enable them to connect the classroom with the real world,” said Professor Andrea Charlow. Charlow teaches courses in family law and alternative dispute resolution at Drake Law.
The Joan and Lyle Middleton Center for Children’s Rights works to advance children’s rights and improve the child welfare system. Students can work in the Children’s Rights Clinic providing legal services to children and families in child abuse and juvenile delinquency cases under the supervision of experienced faculty. Students can also get involved in local, state, and national efforts to improve representation for children and the systems that serve them through lobbying, research, and educational programming.
In addition to the Middleton Center, Drake Law students have opportunities to gain real-world experience in family law through the Law School’s Refugee Clinic, General Civil Practice Clinic, and Juvenile Delinquency Clinic.
Drake Law School offers internships for credit in areas including children’s rights, juvenile law, and disabilities rights. In addition, students can gain experience in competition teams such as the ABA Law Student Division Negotiations Team and on-campus organizations such as the Drake Association for Child Advocacy.
“I’m proud that Drake Law School offers many opportunities for students to make a difference in the important area of family law,” said Jerry Anderson, dean of Drake Law School. “This ranking by preLaw is further evidence of our mission to graduate complete professionals who are ready to serve their communities.”
As we move toward switching from our current Blackboard courses to Blackboard Learn Ultra courses, we are rolling out faculty development and training. Courses with student enrollments will not see the new Blackboard Ultra course views until Fall 2021, which provides time for training and designing quality, student-centered courses.
Starting Oct. 27, all faculty will be enrolled in a Blackboard Learn Ultra instructor orientation course to introduce the new features in a scaffolded approach, and to help you transition to creating engaging courses in this new environment.
We are planning for delivery of four training modules over three weeks this fall with additional training modules to be released in the spring. When appropriate during this time, faculty will have access to sandbox courses (empty course sites with no student enrollments) to explore the new features’ capabilities.
For the fall training, we estimate each weekly training suggestion will take between 1–2 hours to complete. Once the weekly module(s) are released, they will remain available.
Details about each week’s training task will be provided in a weekly OnCampus post beginning Oct. 27.
This Q&A is part of the story series Voices of Drake that highlights the diversity, ambition, and passion of the incredible people who make up our campus community. This week’s story is designed to celebrate and shine light on Latinx Heritage Month, Sept. 15–Oct. 15. It spotlights Denisse López, senior, double majoring in international relations and sociology, and treasurer of La Fuerza Latina.
Tell us about yourself? My name is Denisse López and I am a senior at Drake double majoring in International Relations and Sociology with a minor in Politics. I grew up here in Des Moines and graduated from East High School in 2017. My family immigrated here from a southern, coastal state in Mexico known as Guerrero. I am a first-generation American as well as a first-generation college student.
What was your journey to Drake like? How did you decide to come here? Drake University was in the backdrop of my life for a very long time. My first bus stop for school was on the corner of 22nd and Carpenter, just down the street from campus. It seemed like an easy decision to be able to stay home while getting an education.
What have been some of the highlights of your Drake experience either in the campus community, in the classroom, in the Drake neighborhood, or in the Des Moines area? My favorite part of being at Drake is being involved with the multicultural student organizations. Even as someone who has been in Des Moines almost my whole life, it was still very hard adjusting to the classroom setting at Drake. Groups like LFL, CBS, ACSA, NAACP, and many others under the Unity Roundtable have all been safe spaces where I can feel comfortable while on campus. A specific highlight was during Relays Week in 2019. Members of LFL getting ready to paint our square on Painted Street when we found out Rainbow Union didn’t get a square to paint. The consequences of changing our design without approval seemed so minimal in comparison to making sure LGBTQ+ members of the Drake community were represented on such a major part of the campus.
Who have been some of your important mentors during your time at Drake? Navigating a university setting as a first-generation student has been difficult. One of my biggest struggles has been figuring out not only how to ask for help, but figuring out where to go or who to go to. My academic advisors Mary McCarthy and Nancy Berns have been a huge help during my time at Drake. Professor Berns actually recognized my interest in sociology as an area of study for me before I did—she suggested a minor in sociology a couple years before I decided to take it on as a second major. Aside from being helpful in an academic sense, she has always reached out to make sure I am doing well in other parts of my life as well.
What are your goals after graduation? After graduation, I will continue to be involved in the Des Moines community. This summer I started Food for Our Fighters which is a community organization centered around supporting human rights. Our main focus this summer was supporting the Black Liberation Movement, but we have also supported movements around immigrant and indigenous communities. I would also love to travel and learn more about different cultures throughout Latin America, but that of course depends on how we continue to handle our current circumstances.
You gave a lecture for La Fuerza Latina entitled “Afrolatinidad and Why It Matters” as part of their National Hispanic Heritage Month programming. How did you get involved with La Fuerza Latina? What has it meant to you in your time at Drake? La Fuerza Latina has been a safe space for me on campus. I started attending general meetings during my freshman year and was invited to take on the new position of the organization’s Unity Representative last year. I am currently serving as the treasurer for the 2020 executive team. Over the last few years, La Casa Cultural has been a place where I’ve felt I can be more expressive of my identity, it’s like my home on campus.
Will you tell us a little about Afrolatinidad? Why is it important to reflect on Afrolatinidad during National Hispanic Heritage Month?
Afrolatinidad is a cultural identity marker that celebrates being both Black and Latinx. Anti-blackness is what I call a badly kept secret in Latin American culture. No one wants to explicitly talk about it, but it shows itself in how we talk about the texture of our hair or the color of our skin, even in what kind of people your family thinks are appropriate for a partner. A lot people tend to think that Blackness and Latinidad are mutually exclusive and don’t recognize how much of what we celebrate as Latin American culture is rooted in our African ancestry. There are so many people like myself who fall under this intersection of identity. My family comes from a region in Mexico with a huge concentration of Afro-Mexicans. Mexico didn’t even formally recognize its Black citizens until 2015. It’s important reflect on Afrolatinidad, not just during National Latinx Heritage Month, but all the time because our African roots should be celebrated alongside our Hispanic and Indigenous roots, not forgotten and erased as has been the case for a long time.
The Office of Equity and Inclusion will host two virtual town halls Oct. 8 & 9 at 12 p.m. to share data from the 2019 Campus Climate Assessment. Faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to attend. Advanced registration is required. Register here.
During the town halls, the Office of Equity and Inclusion will review the survey findings analyzed by the ISU Assessment Team. The presentation will acknowledge faculty, staff, and student successes and challenges, and address how we will use this information to work toward developing a campus community that lives up to its fullest potential.
Following the town halls, several roundtable discussions will be held in November to develop next steps.
The campus climate assessment directly aligns with our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, while acknowledging the role Drake University can play in redressing historic injustices that result in continued marginalization of members of specific groups.
— Erin Lain, Associate Provost, Campus Equity & Inclusion
The Sprout Garden will be relocating this fall from its Forest Avenue location to make room for the DMPS Community Stadium project. The garden’s new location will be in the grassy area west of campus on 31st Street, just south of Drake West Village. The new space will allow the garden to expand its growing capacity and educational opportunities through the addition of native plants, trees, and permaculture. You may start seeing this move occur over the next several weeks. While the proposed expansion will happen in phases, click on the photo to see what the space may look like one day.
There are volunteer opportunities and opportunities for classes to get involved with the garden. Email amanda.martin@drake.edu to learn more.
This Q&A is part of the story series Voices of Drake that highlights the diversity, ambition, and passion of the incredible people that make up our campus community. This week’s story is designed to celebrate and shine light on Latinx Heritage Month, Sept. 15–Oct. 15. It spotlights Leah Huizar, assistant professor of English.
Tell us about yourself. I am a Mexican-American poet and writer originally from Southern California. Growing up, I was fortunate to be raised around a large family composed of not only my sisters and parents but also an extensive extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I love the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean and the great forests of my home state. Since moving away, I have lived on the East Coast, in the South, and now the Midwest.
Tell us about your education. Where did you go to school and what did you study? As an undergraduate, I was a double major in English and psychology. I also minored in biblical studies. Though I didn’t know it at the time, looking back, I see how these fields spoke to my longstanding interests in the forces that influence and regulate our lives. As an English major, my most transformative classes were on literary and critical theory. It was there that I first began to understand the ways in which systems and structures operate all around us—and how, through language and engagement, we can respond to them. After college, I went to Penn State for graduate school where I received my MFA.
How has your cultural heritage influenced the person are today/your views of the world/or your field of work? As a poet, I most often write from the intersections of the personal and historic. What this has meant for me is that my Mexican-American identity shapes and motivates many of the kinds of questions I examine in my writing.
What creative projects are you working on right now or what have you been working on recently? What drew or draws you to this project? My first book of poems was recently published by Noemi Press. It’s called Inland Empire and draws on the cultural and historic landscapes of the West Coast and the ways in which colonization, faith, and gendered injustices have shaped it. My current writing project takes on similar questions through an exploration of communication circuits. How do we make and share our voices? How are these obscured or suppressed in our wider culture?
What kinds of courses do you teach? How do your courses connect to your writing life or fit within your broader academic vocation? I teach poetry writing courses in the English department. I also have taught or will teach the Writing Seminar, US Latinx Literature, First Year Seminar, and Intro Women and Gender Studies. To me, each course is an opportunity to ask big questions of writing, of gender, and of ethnicity with really smart student scholars.
How do you hope students come to look at the world differently as a result of their work in your courses? At every course level, and whether literature or poetry, my courses examine how we craft the world through language. Language is always high stakes and consequential. So, our ability to effectively, authentically, and persuasively use it is a dynamic kind of power to carry into the world. This is what we do as writers.
How long have you been at Drake? What is your favorite thing about working at Drake so far? This is my second year at Drake! Among the many joys of working here, I am most impressed with Drake students. There are few things as wonderful as working with students who want to learn and are willing to stretch themselves intellectually.
What is your favorite thing about the Drake neighborhood? I have really enjoyed visiting Mars Cafe for coffee and Lzaza Indo-Pak Cuisine for the chai tea served with lunch.
Who has been the biggest influence in your life and what lessons did that person teach you? I’ve been fortunate to have had many brilliant women as mentors in my life. One influence has been my grandmother. She sees everything—an observer—and this is a central skill for a writer.
How do you like to spend your free-time? Tell us about your hobbies and interests. Creativity is an important part of my life. In recent years, I’ve worked on bookmaking and letterpress printing. I collect antique printing presses which are big cast iron machines that work with metal or wood type. In the past, I’ve printed posters, booklets, and a chapbook of bilingual short stories.
This year is a year like no other. What advice would you like to give to a first-year student at Drake? No doubt this year is challenging and yet I see students adapting and responding with hope and endurance. On a large scale, I see students rejecting injustice, inequity, and racism and defining the kinds of future they will accept from culture. It may be that students ought to advise the rest of us. If pressed, however, I would say please don’t hesitate to reach out to your professors when you need assistance. We want you to thrive!
