ICC’s 2022 Diversity Award Winners Revealed

Bryce Bresnahan

April 22, 2022

Illinois Central College’s (ICC) annual Employee Recognition Ceremony took place on Friday, April 22. The ceremony celebrates the accomplishments of past and current staff and faculty at ICC and accepts award nominations from both students and staff. Some of the award categories include Staff Who Make A Difference, Gallion, and Teaching Excellence. The ceremony also hosts Diversity awards for faculty and staff; Margot Vance and Lonetta Oliver are the 2022 winners of the Faculty and Staff awards respectively.

Margot Vance is a professor in the Humanities department who integrates issues regarding race, equity and inclusion in her classes. Her English 110 course contains a section that compares education, housing, employment, and economics between black and white Americans in the Peoria area. Vance has also attended several events in the last year including:

• the seminar Equity Challenges and Making DEI Work for You
• a workshop on Africa through the Midwest Institute for International/Intercultural Education, in partnership with Michigan State University
• The Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), sponsored by the University of Illinois (UIUC)
• the BH365 Racial Equity Training

Dean of Humanities Lonetta Oliver is the founder of the Minority Student Retention Team, an advocate for minority hires and LGBTQ+ students, and created programming for students in housing for Black History Month and Women’s History Month. Oliver is also notable for bringing diverse speakers to ICC such as Dr. Asao Inoue and Illinois Poet Laureate Angela Jackson. She will host two book club sessions on the book “So You Want to Talk about Race” by Ijeoma Oluo in the spring 2022 semester. Some of the events she has been involved in over the last year are:

• Black Film Festival
• “Understanding Implicit Bias, Microaggressions, and Their Effects in the Classroom” Racial Equity Training provided by UIUC’s Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL)
• OCCRL’s Faculty Equity Academy
• Open Ed Resources Conference
• Webster University’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Conference
• CC Assessment Fair

Oliver and Vance co-chair the Global Learning Committee and were both integral to reestablishing a relationship with CLACS and getting INTST 132 (Latin American Humanities) back on the course schedule for the fall 2022 semester.