The Tri-College Identity, Equity and Social Justice Summer Institute is a week-long orientation sponsored by Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges for first-year students who are interested in exploring issues of identity, power, privilege and social justice. This summer's program will run from August 22-29, 2017.

The goal of the program is to enable first-year students to gain knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the curricular and co-curricular areas of campus life, and to learn how to become effective social agents for change within their own institutions, in the United States, and the world.

For Haverford students, Tri-Co is a gateway to the Rufus Jones Leadership Institute on campus, and Haverford students will have the opportunity to meet with current students and alumni whose leadership and activism shape life on campus as well as in the many communities in which Haverford is invested as part of their transition into Haverford’s intellectual and social communities.

Participants should enter the program with the understanding that they will engage in a process of development and change as they learn about themselves, their identity groups, systems of power and their institutions. Students are housed on their home campuses and will gather on a different campus each day. Tri-Co will include interactive workshops that will engage participants through facilitated discussions, kinesthetic exercises, creative projects, reflective writing and informal activities coordinated by each campus’s Student Resource People. Each day’s programming will begin at 9:30 a.m., and workshops will end at 7 p.m. Transportation back to home campuses starts at 9:30 each evening.

All entering first-year students are invited to apply; however, spaces are limited.

The Tri-College Summer Institute is designed to:

• Provide participants with a supportive space for them to explore individual/group identity issues and to situate these issues within broader systemic and institutional contexts
• Challenge participants to develop greater awareness regarding gender, race, sexuality, socio-economic class, spirituality, ability and power and privilege
• Provide participants with skill development to address issues of inequity on their campuses and beyond
• Familiarize first-year students with the administrative support services on each campus
• Develop a network of peer and administrative support across the Tri-College community

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Ben Hughes, Program Coordinator for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, or Theresa Tensuan, Associate Dean of the College and the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs.