Natalie Gross utilizes past experience for future progress

by Paige Rentz

Monday November 14, 2005

Sarah Lawerence has a Director of Diversity. Natalie Gross comes to SLC from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., where she worked for five and a half years and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Last year, Gross served as interim Assistant Dean for Multicultural Programs, a role in which she oversaw five main heritage celebrations that helped students of color see themselves on campus. The programming focused on them, their culture and their history, and provided education and exposure to majority students.

During her time there, Gross also worked for the Marquette University School of Dentistry as the program coordinator for the health career opportunity program, a federally funded program geared toward providing exposure, recruitment, information, access and hands-on experience to students who are either educationally or financially disadvantaged.

Gross has also worked at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as a counselor with the Upward Bound Program, another federally-funded program geared toward providing social, cultural and educational opportunities for high school students who are financially or educationally disadvantaged. In this role, Gross helped provide attention to students to make sure they didn’t get lost in the shuffle and that they were on track to graduate and ultimately go to college.

At SLC, Gross has many new programs in the works. By next year, she hopes to start a peer mentoring program for students of color where first-years pair up with upperclassmen so that they can have someone specific to go to with questions or concerns that may arise.

Gross is also implementing a series of Diversity Discussions that will center on issues of race, ethnicity and exclusion. The first of these kicked off the series with a discussion about definitions of race. Gross hopes these discussions will cause participants to ask and help answer questions like “Do you understand the historical contexts [of racism]? And where does it really come from? And is it a physiological thing? Is it a sociological construct…And how does it hinder our conversations with one another and even being real with one another because we see that physical barrier that separates us, or that we think separates us?”

Later in the semester, there will be panels on LGBTQIA students of color and mixed-race identities. Next semester Gross plans to have smaller discussions that will continue in a 6-8 week series and that she hopes will become a dialogue “where we come and meet on a weekly basis and we talk, and we share our stories, and we get frustrated, and we disagree, and we agree, and we agree to disagree, and we support one another, and we listen, and we hopefully take something from what we’ve heard and store it, not in the back of the brain, but in the middle, or the front or wherever we access the most those experiences and those voices and those stories.”

What Gross hopes will ultimately come from these experiences is a better understanding of one another and a better ability to see one another as people outside of the setting of the discussion.
According to Gross, she’s “looking forward to working with organizations in cross-collaboration this year and in the years to come to really break down race, ethnicity and exclusion and talk about the hardest thing to talk about. And maybe take some of the taboo, some of the scariness out of it.

“And if people have issues, questions or concerns, come see me, come talk to me. That’s why I’m here. The door is open.”