By Siena Giljum (COM’22)
As a freshman at BU in 2017, Kendall Castaneda (CAS’21) jumped right in to claiming his space as a student of color. And through involvement in his Atlanta Posse scholarship class, the Howard Thurman Center, and one of the centers of his college experience, the Minority Connection Initiative (MCI), he’s helped make room for others to join him too.
While he built a network of like-minded students passionate about building solidarity in “spaces that weren’t made for us,” Kendall says, he also rose through the ranks of MCI. After getting involved thanks to an older student he met at the HTC, Kendall has served on the team’s Events Committee, then through the years as the Events Chair, Treasurer, and Vice President. Now, in his final year at BU, he is the Minority Connection Initiative’s current President.
MCI, as it’s commonly known on campus, strives to build “engaging and lasting relationships between minority students, faculty, and staff to provide support and unity within the BU community,” according to the group’s Instagram page. There, the group’s PR committee posts everything from information about upcoming events to words of encouragement to background for things like Trans Awareness Week and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
The Initiative began operating independently in the fall of 2016, when its founding members sought to find common ground and establish a dedicated space for students from traditionally marginalized backgrounds.
Four years later, a lot has changed. For one, the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground, which often partners with MCI for hosting and planning events, has upgraded from the basement of the George Sherman Union to a dazzling venue in the middle of campus that opened earlier this year. After the grand opening of the new space at 808 Commonwealth and a reception in January, MCI helped present an Open Mic Night featuring Afro-Indigenous LGBTQ+ artist Osimiri, and in-person installments of their Professor Office Hours.
The Rewards of Hard Work
All colleges at the University get a feature in one of MCI’s most anticipated projects each semester. The team puts together The Drop, an exhaustive list of courses taught in a given semester by minority professors—in subjects as diverse as engineering, journalism, and foreign languages. It’s a time-consuming process semester after semester to search through BU’s entire course catalogue and confirm with instructors that they’d like to be included, but it’s even more rewarding for the team.
“It’s always really great, especially when we talk to students and we see how they caught wind of MCI and they bring up the day they found a class on The Drop or they met a professor they like by looking at The Drop,” Kendall says. Combing through the Student Link course offerings is always tiring, but worth it in the end.
The Drop is just one part of the team’s ongoing effort to uplift younger students of color. As Kendall says, show them “there is a chance. And there are people that look like them in the field that they want to enter.”
Face Time Becomes Screen Time
One of the more recent and pressing challenges for MCI has been the onset of the COVID pandemic, which pushed both classes and student events to virtual formats.
“It’s been challenging figuring out what kinds of events and what kinds of initiatives minority students on campus need and want to attend. But then once you kind of figure out what areas are lacking, that’s really rewarding to figure out how to provide events that are helpful and needed,” Kendall says.
Past events have included panels of upperclassmen or graduate students and an Empowered Women’s Brunch last spring. The team has found that a silver lining of moving online is the ease of hosting panels in particular via Zoom, where participants can use the “raise hand” and unmute features to streamline the event format.
Mainstays in the MCI calendar include a joint radio show with WTBU and frequent Professor Office Hours, its longest running and most well known event.
“We get minority professors on campus to come and sit for an hour biweekly on Fridays,” Kendall says. Now offered in a virtual format, Office Hours has featured CAS professors like Liliane Dusewoir, a senior lecturer in French and Spanish, and Fallou Ngom, a professor of anthropology and director of the African Studies Center.
“The MCI is one of the most important student-led initiatives that enable faculty and students of color to get to know each other better, which is difficult given the size of BU,” Fallou says. “Through [their] activities, several students took my classes and performed very well. I commend the MCI members’ efforts.”
Arts and Sciences and Beyond
Close relationships with faculty like Professor Ngom have contextualized and enriched Kendall’s academic and social life in college, and through MCI he seeks to grant his minority peers the same opportunity. His CAS education fosters both hard and soft skills that have informed and built upon his experience as a student leader for MCI, he says. In addition to his major in anthropology, he’s picked up minors in computer science and in music.
“Anthropology really taught me that there’s never one perspective and never one way to perceive the world,” he says, adding that one’s “cultural context” and experiences growing up can completely inform your adult life. And computer science? A great foundation for problem solving skills.
Since MCI oftentimes attracts students who are passionate about social justice work, Kendall’s team of largely women of color has been tasked with not only serving the organization but being online and offline activists, especially during a summer of racial reckoning and reflection on police brutality against Black communities.
“It’s just been very draining to be kind of involved with activists’ work around the clock,” Kendall says. “Because we all do it personally, and then we also do it as a group and organizationally.”
But the team has weathered a challenging past few months with grace, still trying to maintain the balance between events geared towards professional development and ones purely for fun and social connection.
“That was probably one of the best parts about growing with [MCI], being able to learn from a lot of really great people,” Kendall says. In the face of an exhausting year on just about every front, the members of MCI have recognized that connection is more important than ever, especially for first year minority students. They’ve even brought a few freshmen onto their ever-growing team.
“It’s been super challenging, but it’s also been super rewarding.”
Look out for MCI’s upcoming events, including their twice monthly Professor Office Hours, on their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MCI.BostonU/.
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Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (’22) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.