The Office for Community Belonging (OCB) connects, supports, and equips Pepperdine stakeholders as they create and sustain a climate in which everyone can experience a sense of belonging and reach their maximum levels of spiritual, intellectual, and professional development while fulfilling Pepperdine’s mission.
Your gift to OCB will foster ongoing community belonging and diversity initiatives, including:
- Service and Relationship Building within the Greater Los Angeles Area: Step Forward Day, Price Schools, Chumash and Indigenous People service partnerships, micro-enterprise vendor list, et cetera
- Spring/Summer Break Historical and Civil Rights Trips to the Mississippi Delta and South Africa
- Larry D. Kimmons Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Initiative: Community Belonging Circles, speaker series, and activities to connect and inform Pepperdine stakeholders
- Community Belonging Fellowship Awards: Funded cross-school projects to increase community belonging
- Student-sponsored Community Belonging Efforts: Collaborative student-initiated miro-grants to fund events that connect the community
- DUNAMIS Educational Modules: Community-wide face-to-face and virtual education on biblically inspired approach to diversity and inclusion
- Center for Community Belonging (new project): Christian-centered research, education conferences, and interventions that reach internal and external audiences
The fund is unrestricted with priorities determined by the Vice President for Community Belonging.
Our Approach
Using an Appreciative approach, OCB engages University and community stakeholders and leverages Pepperdine’s myriad strengths and resources to unify our community in its varied pursuits of excellence. Based on the model of Ubuntic Inclusion (Smith & Lindsay, 2014), OCB operationalizes belonging as supporting Pepperdine community members to infuse and receive care, communication, connection, mentoring, fairness, trust, and visibility into every interaction, strategy, process, practice, structure, and space–whether face to face or virtual.
