The First Generation Faculty-Staff Identity Council Debuts

The Lens caught up with Dalton Allen, a co-founder of the First-Generation Faculty Staff Council, KU’s newest affinity group. Keep reading to learn more about this organization and how you can get involved.

Q: How did the First-Gen FSC come about?

DA: I’d been thinking about it for a while, so I talked with Fernanda (Lopez) from the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging about the need for and the process to start a council. Fernanda connected me and Kevin McCannon, a faculty member who’d contacted her separately about starting a council. We had people from both the Lawrence and Edwards campuses and staff and faculty interested. We created the group at the start of last fall.

Q: What are the goals of the First-Gen FSC?

DA: Our mission is to promote equity, inclusion, and belonging of all students, faculty, and staff.

We want to create support for first-gen faculty and staff, knowing we’ll be supporting first-gen students as well. We want to do this work and make connections for students so they don’t have to. First-gen staff and faculty focus a lot of time giving back to their communities, so we want to support each other, have space to debrief with others on things like impostor syndrome, first-gen, and professional identities complementing each other, and spreading awareness of first-gen faculty, staff, and students at KU, but it’s hard to know who identifies as that. We want to push the idea that we are a strong population on campus that does a lot of good here.

Q: When do you meet?

DA: This semester, we meet the third Wednesday of every month. After this semester, we’ll reevaluate. We meet largely on Zoom. The goal is to eventually have hybrid meetings and always have a hybrid component. We’ll try to meet in person at the Edwards campus once in a while, too. We couldn’t imagine the FSC without an Edwards component to it.

Q: How can people get involved?

DA: DEIB has a FSC interest form on its site. If you sign up, the information will be sent to Kevin and Dalton.

You can also reach out directly to Dalton or Kevin to be added to our Teams site. We can send Outlook invites to join meetings for anyone interested.

Anyone can be involved – we’re not exclusive to first-gen staff and faculty, but we focus on first-gen support, issues, barriers, and discussion.

The hope is to grow the support structure here at KU for the first-gen community. First-gen is synonymous with interdependency and support. We know it. We’ve been through it. We can lean on each other and create the support systems we want to see. The social aspect goes along with support. We’re exploring working with FIRST to create a mentoring pathway for those first-gen students.