8th Annual Equity Development Institute
Servingness as Shared Accountability – Friday, May 1, 2026
A day dedicated to equity-focused professional development as a way to live out our institutional commitment to our Core Themes. No classes will take place this day to ensure full participation from our staff, faculty, and administrative leadership community. All staff and faculty are expected to attend. If you have questions, please email the Equity Task Force
EDI Day Planning Committee 2026
Dr. Diego Luna, Dr. E.T. Elwin, Edwina Fui, Natalie Bjorge, Gum-Lai Ross, George Lopez, Julie Pollard, Justin Dampeer (co-chair), Keliko Adams, Krystal Welch, Loyal Allen Jr., Lori Adelle, Michelle Weingarden-Bandes, Dra. Maribel Jimenez, Risha Sharma, Rickitia Reid and Patricia McDonald (co-chair)
Lower Sensory Room available in Building 2 during Opening Remarks, Keynote, Executive Cabinet Sharing and Closing Remarks
AGENDA
8:00-8:45am – Breakfast & Community Building (Mt. Townsend)
8:50-9:10am – Welcome/Grounding in Servingness – Dra. Maribel Jimenez (Mt. Townsend)
9:10-10:10am – Keynote: Harvey Hinton III, PhD (Mt. Townsend)
Leading with AI: Authentic Integrity
A reflective, values-centered keynote that uses “AI” as a play on words—Authentic Integrity—to explore leadership as an internal practice rooted in self-awareness, alignment, and care. This talk focuses on:
- Developing self-awareness as a foundation for equitable leadership
- Understanding how values, identity, and lived experience shape decision-making
- Aligning personal integrity with institutional responsibility
- Leading in ways that foster trust, belonging, and collective care
Participants are encouraged to examine how authenticity and integrity influence everyday interactions, especially during moments of tension, change, and accountability. The keynote includes storytelling, guided reflection, and an optional brief Laugh Yoga demonstration to support embodied awareness and collective well-being.
Accessibility & Wellness Note: The Laugh Yoga component is invitational and adaptable, allowing participants to engage at their comfort level in support of accessibility, stress regulation, and inclusive participation
10:30am-12:00pm – Servingness as Shared Accountability (Various Locations)
Highline College teams will engage in reflective dialogue and guided activities to identify how servingness shows up in everyday work, policies, and practices, and how it shapes students’ experiences across our campus. This year’s work offers an opportunity to deepen collective understanding of what it means to serve—beyond providing services—and to reaffirm our shared commitment to Highline’s mission of learning-centered, inclusive practice.
12:15-1:00pm – Lunch (Mt. Townsend) / Self-Care Stations (located on 3rd floor)
1:15-2:00pm – Employee Resource Circles for Collective Growth (Various Locations)
These groups provide opportunities to connect with others who share a specific culture and/or identity. While we all carry multiple intersecting identities, particular aspects of our identity may resonate with us more strongly. Please choose one identity that shapes how you move through the world by attending one of the culture/identity group discussions. We encourage you to bring all your identities with you, and pick an identity/culture group that is salient with you at this moment.
2:15-3:30pm – Workshop Sessions
When Elephants Fight (Executive Cabinet Only)
Presenter: Dr. Harvey Hinton III
Location: Building 8, Room 207
Teaching Science and Mathematics with Compassion
Presenter: Dr. Geillan Ally
Location: Building 29, Room 201
Description: In this workshop, the affective (emotional) side of learning math, a side that is all too often forgotten, will be brought to the forefront. Dr. Geillan Ally will introduce the Compassionate Math Framework and the Cycle of Benign Neglect, both of which attempt to address a significant need in mathematics/STEM education, namely the acknowledgement that learning mathematics is both an emotional and intellectual act. The goal for Compassionate Math is to help faculty work through or around the emotional challenges of learning and teaching math so that students can be their best mathematical selves. This includes thinking about how anxiety and identity affect our efficacy as teachers, especially through the lens of equity and social justice and how that contributes to limiting our own mathematical achievements. Reflective exercises to help you tap into the emotional struggles you and your students encounter while learning or teaching mathematics as well as practical strategies will be shared for faculty and staff to implement.
From Values to Practice: A Collective Conversation on Servingness
Presenter: Chisa O’Quinn
Location: Building 19, Room 202
Description: Servingness isn’t a program — it’s a practice. And practices are built on values. In this participatory workshop, we’ll use the Living Out Your Values card deck as a launching pad for honest conversation about what we each bring to the work of student success and what we need from one another to sustain it. Participants will reflect individually, then move into dialogue with colleagues across roles and departments — exploring where our values align, where they create tension, and how that tension can become a source of growth rather than division. Designed for faculty and staff who want to move beyond good intentions toward genuine, shared accountability.
Stranger Things: The UPSIDE DOWN a framework for Empowering Students and Learning How to Listen
Presenter: Dr. AK Sterling
Location: Building 3, Room 102
In this breakout room we will explore the utility of a few key culturally responsive practices across a number of diverse disciplines, learning communities, and departments. Namely, LIVE LEARNING. Live learning is, “risky; it is freewheeling and open. The instructor yields control of meaning and understanding in the classroom while keeping a keen eye on learning as it is emerging”. Faculty will be introduced to a critical framework that they can then implement or use to change how they engage with their students. A consideration of our impact as instructors and how we make our students feel. The importance of trust and listening in building rapport. This breakout room seeks to flip the current student/teacher dynamic “upside down”. We hope this will be a meaningful exercise and an essential addition to our ever expanding tool kits that help us do our jobs while maximizing student joy and potential. By making space for, and listening to our students when they show up as their whole selves we have the opportunity to not only improve equity gaps, but recognize their greatness.
RA-imagining Faculty Community for the Future of Our Campus
Presenter: Dr. Joye Hardiman
Location: Building 8, Mt. Constance
Description: As higher education continues to shift, many faculty are naming the loss of the informal connections, shared commitments, and sense of community that once sustained campus life. This session argues that servingness offers more than a framework for student success; it offers a way to reimagine faculty community through collective support, shared accountability, and intentional structures of care. In a time of institutional change, faculty need spaces to ask what it means to truly support one another and our students now—not as individuals working in isolation, but as a campus community building a new vision of the future. Participants will reflect on what support looks like in this time and space, explore practices that strengthen connection and responsibility, and leave with concrete strategies for cultivating a more connected, responsive, and equity-minded campus culture.
Moral Injury in the Workplace: Healing and Wholeness: Reclaiming Self in Systems that Harm
Presenter: Dr. Kimberly McRae & Sauntia Griffin
Location: Building 2, Room 101
Description: This professional development workshop provides faculty and staff with a foundational understanding of moral injury—what it is, how it manifests in academic and professional environments, and what individuals and institutions can do to address and recover from it. The workshop balances educational content with reflective activities and practical tools.
Mitakuye Oyasin, All Our Relations: Roles and Responsibilities towards Healing and Balance
Presenter: Matt Remle
Location: Building 21, Room 116
Description: This workshop will explore traditional Lakota thought towards the concept of All Our Relations, or Mitakuye Oyasin. How concepts of roles and responsibilities towards all of creation can lead towards community healing and balance with ones own mental, physical, spiritual and emotional health. Further, how understanding ones roles and responsibilities can assist in betterment of all creation. This will be an interactive workshop including songs and dances.
Pause and Seek the Miracle
Presenter: emareena danielles
Location: Building 19, Room 101
Description: It feels sometimes, like time is rushing faster and faster, that we are more and more overwhelmed and anxious; that chaos is everywhere we turn and sometimes, that is true. But sometimes, it might not be true and what better time to explore what exists outside the chaos than now? We have to believe, imagine, and teach for the small miracles that move us in that brighter direction. And we have to start today, and move at a sustainable pace, a pace that invites us to deeply feel and hold our rage, grief, fear, and terror, and be transformed by that feeling. It’s time for us to dream a different paradigm, dream of all the tiny, spectacular, mundane moments that lead us toward a future full of new suns. Join emareena for an introduction to the Pause, a meaning-making process and cycle for learning, integrating and reimagining in real time in and outside our classrooms.
Using Shared Student Success Outcomes to Support Equity and Belonging
Presenter: Bonnie J. Becker
Location: Building 21, Room 201
Description: Serving students equitably requires more than individual effort—it requires shared understanding of what student success means and how our collective work supports it. This workshop introduces the developing Student Success Outcomes Framework (SSOF) as a practical tool for helping faculty and staff see student success as a shared responsibility shaped by policies, practices, and relationships across the institution. Rather than focusing on student deficits or isolated metrics, the SSOF centers common student success outcomes such as academic momentum, belonging, engagement, and progress—and makes visible how different campus activities contribute to those outcomes. Participants will engage in guided reflection and small‑group activities to explore how their own work aligns with shared outcomes and where collaboration strengthens equity. Grounded in practitioner‑centered design and dialogue, this session emphasizes assessment as a way to learn together, build alignment, and support students more intentionally—particularly those who have been historically marginalized. Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for using shared outcomes language to foster collaboration, accountability, and inclusive learning environments.
3:45-4:15pm – Executive Cabinet: Sharing about Servingness (Mt. Townsend)
4:15-4:30pm – Closing Remarks (Mt. Townsend)
Speaker Bios
Harvey Hinton III, PhD
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Harvey Hinton III is a leadership expert, facilitator, and thought partner with over 20 years of experience supporting equity, wellness, and collective efficacy across higher education, nonprofit, corporate, and community-based settings. A native of Durham, North Carolina, he facilitates leadership development programs for the Center for Creative Leadership, working with senior executives, mid-level leaders, emerging leaders, and cross-sector teams. Dr. Hinton is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders fellow and Chief Change Agent at Kuumba, LLC.
Dr. Geillan Aly
Workshop Presenter
Dr. Aly is a mathematics educator and former award winning Assistant Professor who received her PhD in Teaching and Teacher Education and a Master’s in Mathematics from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the emotional side of learning mathematics and includes how computer-centered learning has affected students’ abilities to control their learning environment and how meditation may reduce mathematics anxiety. Dr. Aly has been teaching at the university level for over ten years and, without sacrificing rigor, brings a personalized math learning experience to the classroom through active learning methods and by centering students’ emotional well-being. She is very familiar with the Common Core Standards and has experience teaching mathematics to Middle and High School students. Underlying all of Dr. Aly’s teaching and research is a dedication to diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice in mathematics education. She enjoys traveling, seeing live music, and is an avid chef. Geillan is also a wife and mother of a beautiful boy. They live near Hartford, CT.
Chisa O’Quinn
Workshop Presenter
Chisa D. O’Quinn, MSW, CMT, is the founder of Re-Purposed Living, a consulting practice specializing in organizational culture, leadership development, and values-centered facilitation. With over a decade of experience in higher education and workforce equity, she partners with institutions and teams to move from stated values to lived practice — creating spaces where accountability and belonging are built together, not mandated from above. A Kolbe Certified Consultant, Certified Mediator and Trainer, and co-recipient of the 2026 NADOHE Institutional Excellence Award for Two-Year Institutions, Chisa brings both the credentials and the lived wisdom to make this work real.
Dr. Joye Hardiman
Workshop Presenter
Dr. W. Joye Hardiman, author of The Ra-Surrection From The Chains of Falsehood, is a storyteller, scholar, and Higher Education Architect whose work integrates ancestral wisdom, scholarship, and community transformation. Born in Buffalo, New York, she earned a B.A. in Western Classical Literature, a Ph.D. in Ancient Kemetic Literary Studies and Urban Education, and a Harvard Management Development certificate. For 18 years, she served as Director of The Evergreen State College Tacoma campus, where she led equity-centered curriculum innovation and institution building. A Fulbright Scholar and international researcher, Dr. Hardiman now serves as Creative Director of Ancestral Art Works, CEO of Hardiman House Inc., host of Let the Ancestors Speak, and founder of the Ra-Imaging Exploratorium—all dedicated to restoring what is seen in ruin and making it more beautiful than before.
Kimberly D. McRae, Ed.D.
Workshop Presenter
Dr. Kimberly D. McRae is an equity-centered higher education leader, educator, and strategist with over twenty-five years of experience advancing student success and organizational transformation. She is the founder of McRae Coaching and Consulting and serves as Dean of Student Success at Seattle Central College, where she leads an integrated ecosystem of programs designed to support the persistence, retention, and completion of historically underserved students. Dr. McRae’s work is grounded in anti-Black and anti-racist frameworks, alongside a deep commitment to addressing systemic inequities within education and the workplace. Through her leadership, teaching, and facilitation, she creates spaces that center healing, accountability, and collective care—critical components in understanding and addressing moral injury. As a presenter, Dr. McRae brings both professional expertise and lived experience to conversations about harm, ethics, and institutional responsibility. Her approach moves participants beyond awareness toward action, equipping them with tools to recognize moral injury, disrupt harmful systems, and cultivate environments rooted in dignity, equity, and belonging.
Sauntia Griffin
Workshop Presenter
Sauntia Griffin is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and a proud alumna of Seattle Central College. She holds a Master of Social Work and a Master of Education in Student Development Administration from Seattle University. Her experience spans healthcare, college access, community mental health, and wellness education. Sauntia’s clinical approach is integrative and holistic. She regularly draws from psychodynamic and psychoanalytic perspectives and is grounded in strengths-based and systems-informed thinking. Her practice centers attunement: helping individuals notice what is happening within and around them, understand the patterns that influence their choices, and build the capacity to move through life with greater compassion and curiosity. When she is not working, Sauntia enjoys reading, writing, fashion, and spending time with loved ones and her dog. She is also a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.
Dr. AK Sterling
Workshop Presenter
Dr. AK Sterling is from the 1900s and uses humor and directness to tackle real, sensitive, and often unexamined issues in the Black community. A longtime English professor, speaker, and workshop facilitator, Dr. AK Sterling is known for blending research, cultural analysis, and transparent dialogue to create learning spaces where students feel both challenged and supported. His work centers on rhetoric, recognition and protest strategies, poetry, emotional development, and the intersections of race, masculinity, and higher education. Whether in the classroom, on a conference stage, or writing curriculum, Dr. AK Sterling’s mission is simple: truth-telling, growth, and helping Black students understand their power, their stories, and their capacity.
Matt Remle
Workshop Presenter
Matt Remle (Hunkpapa Lakota) is the Native American Education Department Program Coordinator for the Marysville School District, co-founder of Mazaska Talks, Executive Committee member for the City of Seattle’s Green New Deal Oversight Board and sits on the steering committee for Stop the Money Pipeline. In 2014, Remle was awarded Seattle’s Individual Human Rights Leader award. In 2017, he was awarded the National Indian Education Association’s Educator of the Year, the Billy Frank Jr. Natural Resource Protection Award and was named one of Seattle’s Most Influential People. In 2020, he was named by the Seattle Times as one of the top ten most influential people to watch for in the next decade.
emareena danielles
Workshop Presenter
emareena has been studying and exploring barriers to learning, and what it means to be a “better teacher,” for over 25 years. Their work grew from the intersection of education, violence, harm reduction, and moves in service of repairing our relationship with learning, and the practice of teaching as a transformative process. Their book “Building a Trauma-Responsive Educational Practice: Lessons from a Corrections Classroom” (2022) is the first book about the impacts of trauma on adult learners, and their chapter, “Educational Wholeness: Urgent, Possible, Irresistible” (2026) invites us to reimagine what education could be. They are compelled to ground their work in what they hear from community groups and impacted people and families, learning also from thinkers, activists, mystics, practitioners, and healers. Their formal education includes a Master’s of Science in Teaching from Portland State University, and a B.A. in Communications from the University of North Carolina – Charlotte. emareena has been studying and exploring barriers to learning, and what it means to be a “better teacher,” for over 25 years.
Bonnie J. Becker
Workshop Presenter
Bonnie J. Becker is Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Success at UW Tacoma, leading campuswide strategy and programs that support purposeful work, collaboration, and student success.