The Office of Inclusion and Community Life, also known as the OICL, also known as Steven Lee (and his pet corgi, Ollie-Joe Lee), exists at the center of life at the Academy. Though students may not hear about all its initiatives, the OICL diligently and consistently works towards the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion through events from the MLK Day workshops to interschool conferences.
Currently, some of the OICL’s main initiatives include working with the different alliances on campus to facilitate their event planning, from the Latin American Student Alliance (LASA) Dance to the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) Pride Prom. The office also communicates with fellow boarding schools to participate in and host cultural competency conferences, such as the recent 2023 Asian American Faces Conference at St. Paul’s School, as well as the 2023 14th Annual Spectrum Interschool Conference at Choate Rosemary Hall.
Director of Office of Inclusion and Community Life Steven Lee shared that he is currently working on a Dialogue and Deliberation Initiative. Through a video created by the OICL student ambassadors as well as a series of personal narratives from students, Mr. Lee hopes to further cultural competency at Deerfield. He aims to create an environment at Deerfield where faculty and students are able to “facilitate and have difficult conversations,” he said. He added, “My goal is to have a faculty that is 100 percent culturally competent, meaning that if something were to happen in the classroom, or in the dorm, or on the sports field related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we always have an adult who is trained on how to support students through that experience.”
To further this goal, Mr. Lee has invited Bob Bordone, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School who founded and directed the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, for faculty workshops. Mr. Bordone will lead a workshop to advance Deerfield faculty’s ability to facilitate dialogue about cultural competency. Mr. Lee also mentioned that a lot of his time is spent working with Deerfield’s grade deans and the counseling center, “talking about individual students and how to support them. So kids who are struggling… academically or socially,” he said.
Mr. Lee acknowledges that the OICL is a work in progress: “Next year, I want to do more marketing, like informing people what this office does and to drum up more enthusiasm and support for it. I was kind of trying to build the airplane and fly it at the same time this year. So I think once we become more established, then we’ll be able to share what we’re doing more.” In terms of diversity in general, Mr. Lee identified the concept of “assimilation” as a prevalent social pressure at Deerfield, explaining that “in some ways, it may be that some degree of assimilation is inevitable, just because we exist as a community,” he said. “But, I would hope that because we are a diverse community, even as you are assimilating, you are somehow changing the dominant culture.”
Finally, some of the OICL’s plans for next year include working on land acknowledgement at Deerfield, a larger scale LASA dance, as well as commending the 20th Anniversary of the passing of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was assaulted to death in Wyoming.
Mr. Lee said he believes that the OICL office will continue to grow and develop in the future, and that more interaction with the student body and active student feedback will be a strong push for growth. He said,“I’ve… been really strategic in terms of living in Doubleday, because I figured I wanted to get to know all of the ninth graders to the best that I could. I’ve also tried to go to a lot of sporting events. And then I just kind of walk up to people and ask them, like, ‘what’s your name?’ And sometimes people are like ‘am I in trouble?’ I’m like ‘I just want to meet you.’” As he plans for another busy year for OICL, Mr. Lee hopes students will reach out to him with ideas of what they hope to see the OICL accomplish next year.