The University Diversity Fund (UDF) was launched in 2019 to fund projects across the University that aim to address inequalities, increase the representation of underrepresented groups and facilitate implementation of good practice at local levels.
Third round successful projects include:
The goal of the ASCU mentorship scheme is to facilitate and assist in the successful applications of Africans who are aspiring to do their postgraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge.
Additionally, the mentorship scheme supports applicants who successfully gain admission to the University of Cambridge with academic training that aids better postgraduate transition.
The project aims to create an integrated WordPress platform for the Black Cantabs Research Society to provide a more holistic historical narrative of black students in Cambridge.
The Cambridge Society for Social and Economic Development (CAMSED) is an initiative of postgraduate students of the Centre of Development Studies.
Its objective is to be “a space for the academic discussion of research and policies related to social and economic development, from a multidisciplinary perspective". Despite this, CAMSED has historically paid little attention to issues of diversity and inclusion in its work. As such, this year the project aims to make a significant improvement in this area by setting up a speaker and workshop series running through Lent and Easter terms on Development and Climate Change.
A main focus of this series will be the impact of climate change on marginalised groups, and a strong emphasis will be placed on inclusive practice in how we administer the series.
The funding will support a number of activities of Pride@CJBS, an interest group led by students that strives to support LGBTQIA+ community and allies.
The activities include implementation of gender-neutral restrooms at JBS, establishment of LGBTQIA+ safe space at JBS, and collaboration within JBS to revisit the recruitment process to incorporate DEI KPIs on all application forms.
The project aims to increase the diversity of images used in testing materials for children.
The initiative focuses on improving the representation of children from minority groups, countering gender stereotypes, and raising public awareness of issues related to race equality.
The images will be shared with other developmental psychologists and uploaded to Open Science Framework to ensure wide access.
The goal of the ‘Scholourship’ project is to create a research magazine and ecosystem that will be a conduit for the creative production of narrative histories and the democratisation of access to academic research.
The goal of this project is to improve access of underrepresented minorities to postgraduate research through the delivery of a hands-on research project co-created by StranksLab and ReachSci.
The project will provide the students with an in-depth experience of the different stages of research including experimental design, experimentation, analysis, write-up and dissemination.
Support the process of reworking the clinical scenarios and role players to be more diverse, representative and inclusive to all protected characteristics.
An example involves including a role play where the patient is homeless allowing students to explore this lived experience and challenges/stigma faced as well as presenting an opportunity to support through rapport building.
The initiative aims to increase awareness, educations and skills to give students the opportunity to adapt clinical communications skills to explore the patient perspective and develop resources in the virtual learning environment.
The project involves a tiered approach to faculty training which will impact all clinical school staff who interact with students (for example administrators, support staff etc.). Both large group lectures to small group work are essential in the delivery of this project.
The project involves developing resources demonstrating micro-aggressions, how to respond to them, and how to use conversations to promote equality, diversity and inclusion. It is hoped that these resources will help to develop skills within the faculty and improve confidence in having intrinsically uncomfortable conversations.
These demonstrations will focus, although are not limited to, racism.
The initiative involves hosting a half-day event to which woman/non-binary researchers in DAMTP and woman/non-binary people in industry within theoretical physics/applied maths field are invited to give talks to undergraduate and Masters’ students taking the Mathematics Tripos.
The project aims to inspire young girls, female students and female young professionals, dispelling myths and highlighting the creative promise of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning careers. The initiative also aims to increase the representation of women in the field of AI and ML.
This project seeks to train the next generation of geoscientists and geographers in public scholarship and community-based research related to land justice, allowing them to develop research skills while engaging, and co-producing knowledge with local communities.
Specifically, it involves developing a pilot program at the University of Cambridge, and a broader open-source curriculum for undergraduate students in the UK – in collaboration with local and national land justice organisations – to involve students in collecting the evidence required to preserve historic rights of way, which must be added to the definitive map of each local authority by 1 January 2026 or will be lost.
Aims to produce a set of undergraduate teaching materials that incorporate under-represented perspectives into the economics curriculum and highlight the contributions that researchers from under-represented groups (e.g. females, ethnic minorities) have made to the field.
Examples include discussing the role of slavery and colonialism in economic growth and exploring systems that contribute to racial inequalities in economic outcomes.
The project involves collaboration with Cambridge staff and students from under-represented groups to co-create these materials, and share them both within the Cambridge Economics department, and the wider community of economics educators.
A one-day conference intended to provide a safe and supportive venue, one that is urgently needed, for current Asian students and scholars from the University of Cambridge.
The conference will help these students collaboratively navigate the challenges of living and studying in the UK, an experience affected by the intersections of race, gender, nationality and the recent COVID-19 pandemic.
This conference will provide Asian students with relevant knowledge and a strong sense of community, supporting their pursuit of academic excellence and ensuring their wellbeing in an equal, inclusive environment, as championed by the University of Cambridge.
The goal of this project is to strengthen representation of East Asian women at Cambridge, and therefore bring about a greater awareness of the need for racial and gender equality.
By inviting directors and scholars in relevant areas to give a talk at Cambridge, streaming films about modern and independent women and organising academic panel discussions, this project aims to achieve three goals:
1) to benefit postgraduate research in this area
2) to bridge Asian artists and Cambridge students
3) to break the stereotype of East Asian female and increase the cultural diversity in our community
Decolonise History of Art is a group led by students which aims to increase the prevalence of Decolonisation and racial justice within art history.
The UDF funding will support continued efforts of the group to diversify the field of art history at Cambridge University through talks and panel discussions which platform the opinions and discussions of people of colour by running two events, and one art exhibition in Lent term.
The project engages with issues of representation within art history, by seeking to platform the opinions and discussions of BAME and LGBTQ+ artists, curators and academics engaging with discussions of decoloniality.
To generate and communicate a number of effective strategies for sourcing diverse candidates through the University’s recruitment efforts.
The project would involve engaging Diversity and Inclusion consultants through the University advertising partners, Penna, who would review the University’s existing recruitment processes and procedures in terms of talent attraction methods (where and how the positions are advertised) and then suggest new strategies of talent attraction.
This would culminate in updating the Diverse Recruitment Framework, with the aim of significantly increasing the number of suggestions that are provided to Institutions for widening the talent pool of diverse candidates.
The public spaces in the Law Faculty building hold potential to showcase the diversity of the Faculty of Law via the work of Law PhD researchers.
The Law PhD researchers come from all walks of life but their research also engages with legal aspects of equality, diversity, and inclusivity in many facets.
The project aims to exhibit their research in the public areas the David Williams Building. Possible themes to be addressed could include race, gender and the law, women’s rights and feminist legal theory, disability and the law, LGBT+ rights, and indigenous rights.
The funding will support the activities of the Law and Race forum for undergraduate and postgraduate law students as well as Faculty members to better understand the many relationships between race and law.
The forum hosts speaker events and a reading circle which enable students to engage with a wider range of perspectives and voices on the multiple ways in which racial inequalities are embedded in the law and incorporates a social aspect to our events to encourage community-building.
The Department of Oncology has recently established a Positive Culture Committee to lead on building an inclusive and open community throughout the department (a major challenge due to being spread over 11 different geographical locations).
The main goal of the project is to identify EDI issues across the department’s multiple sites for the purpose of generating an EDI action plan aimed at creating a more inclusive workplace; this project will focus on use of film to address this goal.
The funding will support a widening participation initiative STEM SMART that seeks to provide free complementary teaching and support to UK (non-fee paying) students in Year 12.
The project involves ongoing tutoring and mentoring so that students can achieve their potential at A Level and secure a university place: furthermore, the project will address the barriers faced by particular groups through mentoring and targeted support during their A Level studies.
The project involves a workshop to facilitate collaboration between local community leaders (East of England) and researchers within the department of Psychiatry.
The aim of the initiative is to understand the barriers and facilitators to participation and identify ways to enable collaborative and participatory knowledge exchange between the department/university and those with mental health issues/experiences/challenges in these communities. This would help to make the departmental research and public events organised by Psychiatry Department more inclusive for these communities and increase participation.
To capture the full extent of human diversity both within and across countries, the project proposes a Diversity Research Sprint in two phases.
Phase One will conduct a systematic diversity audit of the Psychological and Behavioural Sciences (PBS) curriculum to directly address issues of race and intersectionality.
Phase Two will deliver a colloquium with underrepresented scholars to identify the key dimensions of diversity most relevant to different subfields of psychology.
The UDF funding will support the ‘Health for All’ Clinical School initiative in which faculty and students are collaborating to integrate issues of inequalities, diversity and inclusion into the medical school teaching.
The initiative involves holding a faculty workshop for specialty leads to raise awareness of these issues and their relevance to medical education. The goal is to assist specialty leads in critically assessing their curriculum (focusing on race/ethnicity and disability), identify and overcome barriers (real or perceived) to integrating these topics into the curriculum and develop plans for embedding these topics into teaching across the whole curriculum.
End Everyday Racism (https://racismatcambridge.org) aims to understand how racism is experienced at Cambridge and to use this understanding to advocate for anti-racism social and institutional change.
Now in its fourth year, the project does this through a digital witnessing platform that allows to collect and analyse anonymous reports from our community, which we use to raise awareness within and beyond Cambridge of racism and its consequences.
The project focuses on mapping the terrain of racism rather than on individual cases to direct attention to structural racism, under-studied in educational settings, and to remind us that we all have anti-racism responsibility.
The funding will sport expanding the University’s public engagement with LGBTQ+ history and themes (building upon the success of the University Museums’ internationally acclaimed Bridging Binaries programme) to include the Colleges, creating a more welcoming and empowering environment for LGBTQ+ students and staff and celebrating the contribution of historic LGBTQ+ people to the University.
A digital-first programme of virtual tours and presentations will draw on pre-existing research into queer history within the Colleges and benefit from the existing promotion of the Bridging Binaries initiative at the museums, creating greater cohesion and community between these two areas of the University
‘Animal Aspirations’ is a student led project that aims to increase diversity in veterinary medicine and animal related careers.
The initiative aims to encourage more people from racially minoritised backgrounds to apply to study veterinary medicine through engaging student-led workshops, a social media presence, and insightful blog posts. More information here: https://www.animalaspirations.com
The project aims to provide Equality and Diversity facilitation training for volunteers within the department to become Equality and Diversity Champions and for these volunteers to facilitate discussions within lab or student groups based on guided reading.
The aim is to empower participants by initiating discussions and opening up conversations on topics such as (but not limited to) racism, gender identities, sexism and sexual orientation. A previous small pilot has been run within the department and was greeted with positive feedback.
Aims to engage all staff who self-identify as women working for the University, College or associated institution.
The Network aims to use this funding to increase engagement with women employed at these institutions and gain an understanding of what we can do as a network to support their growth and identify gaps in support.