By Mericel Mirabal
When I first heard about this project through Professor Monica Najar, who was my professor my first semester of college, I was interested in participating in it. I knew it was the very beginning of the project and I wanted to help to get it going because I am very passionate about this topic and the social aspect of it was calling my name. The idea of creating a more inclusive workplace and society where people get to share their true and authentic identities and not be discriminated for it but instead embraced, respected, valued, and heard was a goal that I hope we one day get to reach to its fullest potential.
After applying, interviewing and luckily getting in, I was ecstatic yet nervous about what I was getting myself into. It was my first summer away from home, with a teammate who I had never met before, a project that held economic aspects that I wasn’t really too aware of, and with it being vastly open-ended I had my doubts about whether this summer would be successful. This project would be very hands on for my teammate Lucy Zhou and I as we had to come up with where we were going with everything, and I was not normally used to this independence.
Although it was a challenge at first, we were able to sort of narrow down our focus a bit in order to find our way in and actually be able to accomplish something throughout our ten weeks here. We did some general research with scholarly articles and books on different ways that discrimination can occur and discrimination in the workplace. Following that, we realized that many businesses nowadays have diversity and inclusion training or offices, but that those words just tend to be thrown around a lot so we wanted to go out and capture the ideas of underrepresented business owners and entrepreneurs of what inclusivity meant to them, what have been some challenges, and most of all, what has worked for them so that we could somehow spread their message.
We found the perfect way to spread it by using a “cookbook” inspired by Lehigh alum Norm Rump ’59 where our recipe was “how to create an inclusive economy for small businesses,” since that was what we really got to focus on this summer. The cookbook was the best way for us to get our message across because we felt like it could be adjusted to however you please. In a cookbook, you can add or take away things depending on what works for you.
Our goal was to create more awareness on this issue and we were able to do that by starting our very own blog and website which we would use as a space to tell people’s stories and also point out resources and events surrounding this topic in the community. Additionally, we held our very own workshop with four panelists of which came from different backgrounds and careers. This was probably one of the greatest things we’ve done this summer because it was such an open and honest dialogue that was started and we were very ecstatic to have had panelists who kept it real for all of us.
All in all, working on this project was one of the most impactful things that I’ve done in my life thus far. Being able to do this independent work made me realize a lot about myself. With the help of my partner Lucy, I grew more confident in myself because I tend to have social anxiety so doing presentations and speaking to people can be pretty rough for me at times and having Lucy’s reassurance really helped me believe in myself. In general, I just realize that I should not doubt myself as much as I do because I have a lot of potential. Also, I used to never really consider myself creative besides music, but working on the cookbook and reflection project really helped me bring my creative juices to life.
Mainly, this project really helped to affirm that I want to be in a career where I can help people and truly make an impact in their lives. I’m not truly sure where I will end up, but I hope that it is in the field of law or social work. I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had, the people that I’ve met and formed connections with. I’m really excited to see what the future holds and how my research this summer will play out into the rest of my life.