Our Focus Areas
The UCLA Psychiatry Office of Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion has four main goals to help promote diversity and awareness at UCLA Jane & Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior:
Education
- Initiate and foster ongoing proactive and honest discussions regarding common discriminatory practices, macro-invalidation, microaggression, racism, and inequity in academic medicine
- Communally recognize and work toward addressing difficult dialogues surrounding patriarchy, ableism, racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and white privilege/fragility both personally and institutionally
- Affirm an institutional commitment and educational fiat to train the next generation of culturally responsive and linguistically competent JEDI scientists, clinicians, and educators
- Work to ensure that our clinical rotations reflect a more diverse patient population so that trainees can both learn with and serve a more representative community
Research
- Develop a strategic action plan to address issues related to justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in research.
- Provide technical assistance regarding research development and design to broaden the range of research questions and methodologies to enhance inclusion, representation, and diversity of populations under study and equitable health outcomes.
- Promoting mentoring and career development of investigators from historically underrepresented populations in developing and sustaining research careers.
- Promote engagement with community stakeholders in developing research studies and methods that address health disparities within communities
Health Equity and Social Accountability
- Ensure transparency and accountability in organizational structures and policies to proactively prevent “institutional betrayal” or bias within the university and the inadvertent perpetuation of clinical and research health disparities in the community
- Engage in a continual process of self-study and reconfiguration of institutional culture through cultural humility, community collaboration, and public transparency
- Adopt an explicit “anti-racist framework” throughout the academic unit of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, and Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital
- Resolve to ensure that a commitment to social accountability and health equity becomes a core value that permeates all aspects of our clinical services, research, and community outreach
Communication & Community Engagement
- Recognize and honor the importance of community and client/family perspectives in education, research, services delivery and policy change.
- Safeguard and protect a collaborative communication space that allows for trust development and respect, even when there is dissent which challenges us to be better and stronger together, even at the risk of publicly appearing vulnerable and in the process of learning as a JEDI
- Promote a culture of open communication and inclusion of diverse community stakeholders in identifying community needs, opportunities for collaboration, and needs for behavioral health services.
- Safeguard and protect a communication space that is inclusive, promotes trust, allows for dissent and challenges us to be better and stronger together in academics and in partnership with communities
- Actively engage and maintain regular relationships with community stakeholders to ensure that scholarly activities are relevant to community needs, and that community is engaged in scholarly activities (E.g., Community Based Participatory Research and Community Partnered Participatory Research).
- Work to create new placements for our trainees and collaborations of our faculty with community organizations via clinical rotations in community clinics, policy engagement with local civic organizations and research/evaluation