UW’s DDEEA’s Damon A. Williams Trailblazing Change Agent Award: Recognizing Excellence (Part 2 of 2)
Assistant Vice Provost for Student Engagement and Scholarship Programs, Dr. Raul Leon (l-r); Senior Operations Officer & Chief of Staff, Dr. Torsheika Maddox; University of Michigan's Associate Vice Provost & Deputy Chief Diversity Officer, Dr. Katrina Wade-Golden; Founder of the Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement at UW-Madison, Dr. Damon A. Williams; Assistant Vice Provost for Accessibility and Belonging Administration, Angela Miller; Vice Chancellor for Inclusive Excellence, Director of the Division of Diversity, Equity & Educational Achievement, Dr. LaVar J. Charleston
by Jonathan Gramling
As a part of the first day of the UW-Madison Diversity Forum held November 13-14 at Union South, Vice Chancellor Dr. LaVar Charleston announced a new award the UW-Madison DDEEA was creating in honor of its 15th Anniversary, the Damon A. Williams Trailblazing Change Agent Award. And who was more fitting to receive the inaugural award than Williams himself.
“Damon Williams has been a key leader in diversity work,” Charleston said. “His visionary leadership was instrumental in founding the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement. He sparked a movement of transformative impact in the field of inclusive excellence and diversity within higher education. The award is named in honor of him and reflects his commitment to inclusive and organizational excellence and recognition of his outstanding distinguished leadership empowering the work of community, access and belonging at UW-Madison and beyond. We’re really excited about establishing this award. He is the author of the Chief Diversity Office and Strategic Diversity Leadership, which are seminal pieces that helped lay the foundation and approach and the framework in how we approach creating inclusive environments and creating diversity and equity and justice in the work that we do in higher education. It’s only fitting that at our 15-year anniversary, we honor him who has been central in developing this at UW-Madison and it being spread all across the country and the world.”
Additional remarks were given by University of Michigan's Associate Vice Provost & Deputy Chief Diversity Officer, Dr. Katrina Wade-Golden, who went to school with Williams and has been a long-time collaborator before a video was shown of friends and colleagues — including his wife and daughter — congratulating Williams. It was a truly moving moment for Williams.
“It was very special,” Williams said during a phone interview. “And what probably made it even more special than any other moment that I have had in my life is the fact that my wife and my 11-year-old daughter had a chance to participate in it and to hear their words and have the final word be given by my daughter was a special, special moment. To have Dr. Katrina Wade-Golden who flew in from the University of Michigan to kick it off with her words and my dear friend and sister and colleague to bookend that with my daughter and her words and to hear her speak those words of great resilience and affirmation to her father and those are the words that I give her and those are the words that when I stepped away from higher education to go work with Boys & Girls Clubs of America, those are the words that I wanted to breathe into young people across the country. And as I work with thousands of universities and other types of organizations, those are still the same type of words that you want to have that codified and recorded and memorialized by my daughter at 11-years-old, it was a once in a lifetime type of moment. And to say that it was overwhelming and incredibly endearing and special would be a real understatement.”
He was also gratified by the division naming the award after him.
“I was truly, truly humbled and filled and also emboldened,” Williams recalled. “When you have these types of opportunities that your good work is recognized and you are affirmed and you are seen, I think those are the moments that should embolden you to keep going because you are going to have moments when you are down. You’re going to have moments where things aren’t going well. You’re going to have moments where it feels as if the world is against you. That’s just what we call life. And in these moments where people fill up your love cup, fill up your possibility cup, fill up your innovation cup, and fill up your hope cup, I couldn’t be more thankful for what UW-Madison, leaders in the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement, Vice-Chancellor LaVar Charleston and his team and other members of the community and the couple of thousand people who came out to celebrate it either live and in-person or those who came out virtually did. It was an incredible homecoming.”
Since he left Wisconsin for a senior position with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Williams left after four years to found the Center for Strategic Diversity Leadership and Social Innovation and the National Inclusive Excellence Leadership Academy.
“We work with colleges and universities, companies, health care organizations, k-12 schools, non-profits and a little bit of government agencies,” Williams said. “During that time when we went independent, we do research, training, strategy and change management work with folks around diversity and inclusion, helping leaders build competence in the area of emotional intelligence and social intelligence. We’ve done everything from crisis intervention as organizations have been in challenging moments to helping them understand their capabilities to respond various different dynamics. One of the things that I’ve been working a lot on now is Israel-Hamas and helping institutions to engage antisemitism, helping institutions to gauge anti-Palestinian Islamophobia dynamics. We’ve been quite busy. And during this time span, we’ve worked with everyone from the University of Michigan to Harvard to the University of California to Clemson to the Air Force Academy to FedEx to the Brooklyn Nets. It’s a really diverse set of organizations that we have had a chance to support.”
And while there is a broad spectrum of organizations that he works with, they also have common qualities.
“Spending time at Harvard versus working with 200 community colleges in California couldn’t be more geographically distant, but in some ways, they are different and in other ways, very similar,” Williams said. “They are still trying to build capability to respond to a changing world. They are still trying to help empower all their students, faculty and staff to be able to thrive and grow to do their best work. They are still trying to overcome whatever hurdles that they have. And then we can double down on that and say, not just working across the higher education ecosystem, but you are also working in other sectors. You start to see the same types of issues, the same types of challenges, the same types of realities at the DNA level of how an organization functions at its core, granular method of how they are trying to tackle the same types of issues even though they look wildly different on the surface. Once you get beneath the surface, you’re still talking about, ‘How do we evolve our culture?’ ‘How do we create new norms and expectations?’ ‘How do we create new policies and procedures?’ ‘How do we create new investments in trying to innovate and do things differently in terms of access, opportunity and leadership development?’ So it is very rewarding work.”
Inclusive Excellence is needed now more than ever. And there is no better person to facilitate the change than Dr. Damon A. Williams., the first recipient of the Damon A. Williams Trailblazing Change Agent Award.