Systemic Change
The goal of the SIUE TRHT Campus Center is systemic change. Our programs and initiatives have measurable outcomes, have been co-created and are facilitated with members of our local communities. Truth-telling undergirds this goal and is part of the healing process required for authentic systemic change to occur.
Truth
Digital Media - We use digital media to highlight truths about East St. Louis and its residents to foster narrative change. E-Stories, a digital storytelling project, is one way that we contribute to narrative change.
Universities Studying Slavery (USS) - SIUE is a member of the USS Consortium whose goal is to explore the history of slavery and its legacies of inequality on our campuses and in surrounding communities.
Research/Publications - We support collaborative research projects focused on unveiling the hidden racial histories of SIUE and communities in the Metro East region.
Healing
Story Circles
Story circles “are experiences that engage the heart, require the heart to be open and expansive, reaffirm the humanity in all of us, acknowledge the unconscious bias that lives in all of us, are the spiritual work of affirming and loving ourselves, and acknowledge ‘by listening’ the harms of the past through people’s stories.”
Racial Healing Circles
Racial healing circles support the relationship-building process. Beginning Fall 2022, we will begin facilitating Race to Heal circles. Beginning Spring 2023, we will also host training workshops to prepare others to facilitate racial healing circles on campus and in the broader community.
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville exists on and serves a region that includes the traditional homelands of The Illinois Confederacy, including the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa; and the Kiikaapoi (Treaty of Edwardsville, 1819), Myaamia, Aakiiwaki (Sauk), Meskwaki (Fox), Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Kaw, Missouria, Quapaw, Ponca, Omaha, Osage, Onödowáʼga (Seneca), and others. Through this acknowledgment, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the University are renewed and reaffirmed.
