For our Social Change Project, we decided to host a panel focusing on Native American and Asian representation on campus. EMU prides itself on diversity and inclusion, and while these principles are preached, they sometimes fall flat with actual representation. As of the 2023-24 academic year, 2.5% of EMU’s student body identifies as Asian, while only 2 students identify as Native American. We wanted to do our social change project on this topic because it hits very close to home for both of us. 

At our event, we were pleased to see a more sizable crowd than we anticipated and we had an amazing dialogue among our panelists. While our project was centered around Native American and Asian representation, we opened it up for conversations about equal treatment as a whole. Our panel was very diverse and we were able to get many perspectives on the issue of representation at EMU. 

After completing our project we learned how important it is to make the effort to create spaces to have conversations like these. Both of us were frustrated by the seemingly unequal treatment of Asians and Native Americans at EMU, so we decided that we wanted our project to represent the change we wanted to see on campus. During our presentation, issues about commuter students needing more of a comfortable place on campus or updating the commuter lounge, and clubs like APISA needing to be treated equally with other important clubs on campus were discussed heavily with the student body and staff. Changes like adding a couch to the commuter lounge or more people giving APISA events a try would help unheard voices on campus be heard, making the campus community stronger than ever.

We both love EMU and want it to be the best it can be and while we have made a lot of progress with representation and equal treatment among different groups on campus there is still work to be done. We are simply asking for more recognition of smaller minority groups on campus like Native Americans and for Asian students to get the same treatment other groups do especially with clubs like APISA. With that, we want to say thank you to all who attended and those who expressed interest in this topic.