A ceremony held in Larison Dining Hall, hosted by the President’s Diversity Council, recognized recipients of the first annual Diversity & Inclusion and Burma-Bucknell awards on April 4. Eight awards in total were presented to individuals, organizations, and collaborative teams.

Professor of French Angèle Kingué and Mona Mohammed ’16 each received a Burma-Bucknell award. In terms of the Diversity & Inclusion awards, Taylan Stulting ’16 was honored in the student category; Associate Professor of Music Christopher Para in the faculty; Writing & Teaching Consultant Margaret ‘Peg’ Cronin in the staff; the Stadler Center for Poetry in the office or program; Bucknell ATHENA in the student organization, and Common Ground and BuckWild in the common initiatives.

Audrey Love ’16, who accepted the common initiatives award on behalf of Common Ground and BuckWild, said that the groups collaborated to design and facilitate a training program that encompassed topics of diversity, facilitating activities designed to help their leaders learn about and prepare them to address topics of gender, race, and mental health.

“This award demonstrates the necessity of collaborating in order to foster an awareness of difference in the Bucknell community. Without the insights and efforts of Common Ground … we would not have been able to accomplish what we did,” Love said.

Love added that, in her opinion, diversity and inclusion are particularly important “because monolithic perspectives within a community breed a destabilizing sort of apathy.”

“Being confronted with views and experiences that differ from ours force us to break down and re-evaluate our own in a way that fosters personal and communal growth,” Love said.

Caitlin Maloney ’16, who accepted the student organization award on behalf of ATHENA, said that the ceremony marked “an incredibly special moment” in her University career because it acknowledged the diversity and inclusion of women as something to be celebrated.

“As a current senior, I have been very proud to watch as the promotion of Diversity & Inclusion at [the University] has increasingly become a main goal of the administration and thus within the student body. I foresee the Diversity & Inclusion awards to be a very successful operation that will continue the tremendous efforts to champion diversity and inclusion on campus,” Maloney said.