Student leaders win grant to offer in-depth equity and inclusion training

Last fall, while reporting for UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s hyperlocal news sites Oakland North and Richmond Confidential, a handful of first-year student leaders recognized a need for guidance in covering communities that were new to them. Two of them, Gabriela Arvizu (‘16) and Zainab Khan (‘16), applied for and received a grant that will allow the school to address this need.

As a result of their initiative, the J-School will now offer in-depth training on equity and inclusion.

The $7500 grant from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion has allowed Arvizu and Khan to hire Oakland-based trainer Tammy Johnson, of TMJ Abundance Counseling.

Johnson’s program teaches racial, gender and social justice principles and was developed to inspire individuals and organizations to embrace the value of equity.

The organization’s mission includes building awareness, solutions, and leadership for racial justice by generating transformative ideas, information, and experiences.

Reporting in unfamiliar territory is a challenge for many J-School students: during their first semester, hyperlocal news reporting classes send them into diverse and sometimes underprivileged communities in Richmond and Oakland.

The training will get students thinking critically about how to report in a community that may be vastly different from their own background, Arvizu said. It will also address how one’s own background and worldview could affect one’s reporting.

Last week, Johnson led second-year student leaders in a two-day equity and inclusion training. Today, the trained students will lead the first workshop for the incoming class of first-year students as part of their orientation. More workshops, led by local leaders, experts, and journalists, will be offered over the course of the semester, Khan said.

“I think it’s important to think critically about the communities that we’re covering and how we, as journalists, can use our abilities to report and serve those communities,” Arvizu said.

The education is also aimed to help students become more aware of their own privilege and create a safe space for everyone at the journalism school, Khan said.