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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion 

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Building and implementing a program and campus-wide engagement that reflects diverse identities and experiences, advances equitable access and success, and creates a sense of belonging is central to the intent and effectiveness of the Bonner Program. At its core, the Bonner Program aims to support class diversity within the American higher-education landscape by supporting the admission, enrollment, and success of students with high financial need, including many first-generation college students.

The Bonner Program also emphasizes the learning and civic outcomes that come from sustained relationships, reflection, and dialogue across difference. In the Bonner evaluation literature and related research on service-learning and civic engagement, engaging across lines of difference is associated with gains in students’ learning and longer-term civic outcomes, especially when experiences are structured with intentional reflection and opportunities for dialogue.

We aim to cultivate leadership development and program climates in which students of all genders can thrive and be recognized as leaders. This commitment is represented in several policies and practices including:

• A focus on increasing access and success for students with high financial need. This is built into the Bonner Scholar Program recruitment guidelines (which specify that 85%+ of Scholars must be Pell eligible) and is also practiced throughout the Bonner Leader Program; 

• At the same time, programs also welcome and involve some students of higher socioeconomic backgrounds. We recognize that service and civic engagement can provide a shared context for learning and community-building, and when designed intentionally, can strengthen students’ capacity to work across differences in identity, power, and lived experience;

• Diversity is one of the Bonner Common Commitments, which are intentionally woven into all programs through education, training, reflection, and other strategies;

• In fact, “dialogue across difference”—the ways a program creates opportunities for students to engage with and learn from a variety of individuals (including peers, community residents and partners, staff, and faculty)—is a key dimension of program impact and has been linked to later civic outcomes in the Bonner research and related studies.

Indeed, engaging with difference has been found, through evaluation of the Bonner Program, to be one of the strongest contributors to its effectiveness. You can learn more here: The Relationship of Diversity to Program Impact.

On campuses, the Bonner Program and its broader efforts to build a sustained infrastructure and culture for community engagement can advance all four of these areas. At the same time, research on service-learning suggests that equity outcomes are not automatic: they are strengthened when programs are intentionally designed with inclusive practices, community-centered partnership, and structured reflection and dialogue.[3] This section provides additional resource material and examples.