Institutional Equity & Belonging Leadership Team
Departmental Leadership
Christian Gonzalez
Director of the Butler Center
Kate Holbrook
Chaplain
Nancy Rios, Ph.D.
Director of Belonging & Engagement
Christopher Sewell, Ed.D.
Assistant Vice-President for Institutional Equity & Belonging
Rosalie Rodriguez
College Diversity Officer
IEB Leadership Agreements
As leaders within Institutional Equity & Belonging, we share responsibility for helping Colorado College become a more equitable, welcoming, and effective institution for all members of our community, starting first and foremost with our students.
These agreements articulate how we aspire to lead: how we engage with our community, build partnerships, navigate challenges, and work toward meaningful and sustainable institutional change.
We are responsible for identifying barriers, inequities, and gaps that affect the communities we serve and speaking honestly about those realities, even when the conversations are difficult.
We also recognize that people across the institution bring different experiences, knowledge, perspectives, and levels of understanding to this work. We approach our roles as both advocates and educators, leading with empathy and clarity while remaining grounded in accountability.
Our goal is not only to identify problems, but to help others understand them and become partners in creating solutions. We can hold people accountable while still creating pathways for learning, growth, and partnership.
Progress is not always immediate or linear. We commit to approaching difficult moments with courage and persistence, extending patience and grace to ourselves and others without losing sight of the change we seek.
Rather than assuming intent, we seek to understand context, motivations, constraints, and competing priorities. Curiosity helps us uncover root causes, strengthen relationships, and develop more thoughtful and effective solutions.
Meaningful and sustainable change is built through relationships.
We intentionally cultivate trust within our teams and with campus partners. When challenges arise, we engage directly and respectfully, recognizing that strong relationships allow us to navigate disagreement, practice accountability, and sustain difficult work over time.
We understand that belonging is not only something we seek to create for others; it is something we cultivate through trust, accountability, care, and mutual support.
Equity and belonging are not the responsibility of any single office or division.
We actively build partnerships across the institution, share knowledge and resources generously, and help others develop the skills and confidence to advance equity and belonging within their own areas of responsibility.
Our role is not to own this work for the institution, but to help create an institutional community equipped and empowered to advance it together.
Our role is not to solve every problem ourselves, but to create the conditions in which challenges can be addressed effectively and sustainably.
We develop systems, practices, partnerships, and staff capacity that allow our work to have lasting impact beyond any one person, program, or intervention. In doing so, we seek to strengthen the institution's collective ability to respond, learn, and improve.
Many of the communities we serve experience real and immediate challenges and harm. We honor that reality while recognizing that lasting change often requires patience, coalition-building, and thoughtful strategy.
We distinguish between immediate response and long-term change, ensuring that urgent needs do not prevent us from addressing systemic causes—and that the pursuit of systemic change does not prevent us from responding to immediate needs.
Effective leadership requires understanding both individual experiences and the systems that shape them. We move intentionally between individual concerns, office and divisional practices, cross-campus collaboration, and institutional systems, recognizing how each level influences the others.
We seek to address challenges where meaningful change can be most effective while remaining attentive to how decisions, policies, and practices affect individual people and the broader community.
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