Community and Belonging at HDS
See the full HDS Community Impact Fund Report.
Please note that, effective July 1, 2025, the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging has been renamed the Office of Community and Belonging.
Harvard Divinity School aims to educate and cultivate ethical leaders who can help create a just world at peace. This commitment is inextricably linked to the work carried out by HDS’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB), led by Melissa Wood Bartholomew, MDiv ’15. Bartholomew began serving as the School’s associate dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in July 2020. Steph Grayson Gauchel joined the office as assistant dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in June 2022.
DIB’s approach is rooted in a heart-centered, relational epistemology that operationalizes love through healing and connection and is carried out through a restorative justice framework. The aim of every DIB initiative is to advance the vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS that contributes to the vitality of the HDS community while cultivating an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can flourish.
While the work of the DIB office has been responsive, it has also been intentionally proactive. DIB provides structural support to help facilitate the collaborative work across departments and communities within HDS, cultivating the systemic change that leads to cultural transformation. Two key examples of this collaborative work are the Standing Committee on Diversity & Inclusion (SCDI) and the Racial Justice & Healing committee (RJH), both chaired by Bartholomew and comprised of HDS staff, students, and faculty. The SCDI is a long-standing committee that makes recommendations to the faculty and addresses structural changes to advance DIB. It also developed the DIB Care Team, a resource to support members of the HDS community who have experienced DIB-related harm or are worried they have caused harm. RJH, which was initiated when Bartholomew began in July 2020, aims to implement programming that advances racial justice and healing within the HDS community and beyond. RJH is responsible for casting our school’s vision for building a restorative, anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS.
DIB also coordinates the Reorientation and Common Conversation. This collaborative, school-wide initiative was launched in the fall of 2020 by the RJH and is supported by the SCDI. This year-long series of community engagements aims to help us reorient ourselves around our shared HDS values and commitments, including respect, dignity, mutual understanding, and trust with a particular focus on dismantling and healing from racism and oppression. This program continues to be the DIB’s anchor initiative.
During the 2022–23 academic year, the Reorientation and Common Conversation centers around Harvard University’s Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. The report tells the story of Harvard’s extensive entanglements with, and complicity in, slavery. It also contains recommendations for Harvard’s leadership and community to guide the work of reckoning and repair. Under the DIB office’s guidance, HDS community members are engaging in this read with the intention of working towards furthering our vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS, helping the University implement and expand upon the recommendations in the report, and ultimately advancing a vision of a world healed of racism and oppression. Throughout the year, the DIB office has been facilitating a series of circle sessions with members of the RJH committee, designed to grapple with the report through a restorative framework. This has included large- and small-group sessions as well as affinity spaces for further processing.
Aligned with this work, in spring 2023 Bartholomew joined Diane L. Moore, faculty director, Religion and Public Life, in hosting a six-part series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to engage the question, “What does the academic study of religion teach us about the complex histories and legacies of slavery?” Covering topics such as “Enslavement in the Formation of Earliest Christianity,” “Religion, Race, and the Double Helix of White Supremacy,” and a dialogue with a descendant of the largest slave trading family in the U.S., this series, attended by members of the HDS and broader Harvard community, also drew thousands of registrants from around the world.
—by Sarah Rubin and Melissa Wood Bartholomew; Photo credit: Justin Knight