Pablo Tutillo '13 Chair of Diversity and Equity
Pablo Tutillo, SGA Chair of Diversity and Equity, has a lot in mind for diversifying our campus. His job as Chair makes him responsible for overseeing and promoting diversity on campus, and he is taking a new step in accomplishing this by working to create a coalition of underrepresented clubs and groups on campus into an overarching Diversity Committee.
Tutillo greeted me at an Oasis booth in Cro with a friendly but determined smile. Late night Cro was active and bristling with conversation, but Tutillo’s voice carried well as soon as he started talking, clearly becoming excited about this coalition.
The members of this coalition include “underrepresented groups and clubs on campus,” which Tutillo later clarified as diverse groups and clubs that are promoting cultural or religious understanding, as well as those who advocate for a social justice issue that is not yet widely recognized on campus.
Currently there are about ten clubs and groups that are involved in this coalition: multicultural clubs such as Yalla Bina, M.E.Ch.A. (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), La Unidad (Latino/a awareness), and ASU (African Student’s Union); human rights groups such as Human Rights Now and CoAST (Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking), as well as Spectrum (LGBTQ awareness) and the Women’s Center.
Tutillo’s goal is to bring these underrepresented groups together so that they can have better grounds to pursue their goals on campus, as well as have louder voices in SGA. By creating this coalition, Tutillo hopes to create a network among these various clubs, and to give them a stronger presence in SGA through facilitating communication and inter-club collaboration. Tutillo thinks the coalition will create networks to encourage clubs and groups to collaborate with each other, which would then help to create a livelier presence of these clubs and groups both on campus and in SGA.
“When you’re alone it’s hard to do things – but when you can collaborate with other groups, it makes it a bit easier,” he said.
Tutillo is excited to see what the coalition brings. “I want to see more collaboration on events that can reach out to a greater part of the student body,” he told me eagerly, pointing out that no such coalition has ever existed and that previously, there existed no common space for these clubs and groups to work together.
In a broader scope, he hopes that uniting the clubs would help diversify the campus and encourage the whole campus community to think globally. “One of my missions is to have a more globally conscious community,” Tutillo said. “I would like to encourage clubs to be globally conscious of where they fit in the context of the world.”
Tutillo has a dynamic agenda for the future, and is looking to incorporate this coalition of clubs into the C-book, which outlines the missions and procedures of the SGA. This would make it easier for future Chairs of Diversity and Equity to keep the clubs and groups better involved in SGA.
Photo from College website.
