Best of CASE District I Award
 

Institution: Dartmouth College

Title of entry: Diverse Voices: The 50 for 50 Storytelling Project

About this entry: Dartmouth alums have been making their mark on the world since 1769, but for most of that time, women and people of color were missing from the Dartmouth story. During the last five decades, student diversity grew with the admission of women in 1972 and efforts to recruit and retain racially-diverse students.

To recognize these diverse alums and their impact on the world, Dartmouth celebrated three 50-year milestone anniversaries in 2022:

1. The opening of undergraduate admissions to women through coeducation

2. The founding of the Black Alumni of Dartmouth Association (BADA)

3. The formal establishment of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department (formerly the Native American Studies Program)

As part of the celebration, Alumni Relations launched the “50 for 50 Storytelling Project” to bring attention to these communities by sharing stories from 50 different alums, spanning 50 classes over the last 50 years. Stories were disseminated through multiple forms of media, including a nine-episode podcast that gave alums the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words.

The podcast featured a tribal council president, a non-binary graduate student studying transgender population health, an internationally acclaimed chef renowned for her plant-based African recipes, and many others. The stories focused on their time at Dartmouth, their experiences as a member of a diverse community, their current career paths, and their hopes for the future of Dartmouth.