| Session Time | Session Information |
9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. All Day Community Engagement | Community Check In Great Hall - Session Overview
All attendees are required to register and check in to participate in the Summit. On site registration will be available. Registration and check in allow attendees to identify one another, receive swag items throughout the two days, and access real-time updates and information.
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9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. All Day Community Engagement | Community Connection Lounge Great Hall - Session Overview
Throughout the Summit, we invite all members of the GW community in attedance to utilize the lounge to connect with other attendees in the lounge area. If you need to get some work done and wish to stay present at the Summit, you may also use this space.
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9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. All Day Community Engagement | Community Crochet Presented by Taiwo Oseni and Brianna Attey Mouanjo Great Hall & 3rd Floor USC - Session Overview
This interactive engagement opportunity invites participants to co-create a “community crochet” as a living symbol of belonging and shared purpose. Through the simple yet powerful act of crocheting together, attendees will engage in conversation, reflection, and relationship-building across identities, roles, and perspectives here at GW. The experience is designed to foster restoration, creativity, and a deeper sense of being part of something larger than oneself. No prior crochet experience is required. Participants of all skill levels are welcome to contribute and will be given the chance to learn the beginning steps of crocheting.
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10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. All Day Community Engagement | Peaceful Place to Retreat: Cultivating Creative Care - Break Out Space for Art Based Regulation Strategies Presented by Arika VanBrunt, LPC, ATR-BC, ACS, BC-TMH & GW Art Therapy Clinic 3rd Floor USC - Room 301 - Session Overview
Take a pause during the Summit to use sensory materials for self-care and reflection. You are welcome to use the space for a micromoment of care or stay to engage in art processing around your experiences and connection with others in the space. The GW Art Therapy Clinic will hold the space throughout the day.
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10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. All Day Community Engagement | Community Tabling Presented by GW Community Partners 3rd Floor USC - Session Overview
Please visit our GW Community Partners across the 3rd Floor of the University Student Center. Each table will have an engaging expeirence and invites you to learn about their team, resources, and location.
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Session Information |
| 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. | Community Nourishment: Breakfast Great Hall - Session Overview
Continental breakfast will be available to Summit attendees. Please nourish yourself and enjoy meeting other attendees over breakfast.
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| 9:15 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. | Community Wellness: Sound Bath
Collective Grounding: Mindfulness, Community, and Emotional Resilience Presented by Natalie Hampshire Ngounou Multicultural Student Services Center (MSSC) 5th Floor, University Student Center Multipurpose Room - Session Overview
This 30-minute sound bath integrates mindfulness, breath awareness, and therapeutic sound to support emotional regulation and collective well-being. Designed for a diverse university community, the session centers inclusion, and cultural awareness. Participants will engage accessible grounding practices that help reduce stress and restore nervous system balance. The experience acknowledges the varied lived realities within the room and offers space for reflection without requiring personal disclosure. Sound and guided meditation are used to cultivate steadiness, connection, and shared presence. No prior experience is necessary, and all are welcome. Attendees are welcome to bring a yoga mat.
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| 10:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. | Morning Community Session: Inspiring Our Community Presented by Lamont "Tory" Stapleton USC 3rd Floor Amphitheater - Session Overview
Join us for an inspiring morning keynote from a community organizer and connector based in LA who started with an idea that led to ripples of change. From responding to the LA fires, creating community during COVID, and seeing the full humanity of those incarcerated, we invite you to meet Tory.
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| 10:30 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. | Courageous Community: Holding Tension, Building Trust Presented by Rev. Dr. Jamie Washington 3rd Floor USC - Room 309 - Session Overview
This interactive session invites members of the GW community into an honest, structured dialogue about what community means in a politically engaged and often polarized campus environment. Grounded in storytelling and facilitated reflection, participants will explore core questions: What is community for me? What is my responsibility within it? How do we respond to groups in immediate need without creating new exclusions? And how do we engage across differences when those differences feel deeply tied to identity, humanity, and values? Through guided dialogue, small-group conversation, and perspective-taking exercises, attendees will be challenged to examine their assumptions while listening for understanding rather than rebuttal. The session intentionally creates space for complexity and nuance while offering practical tools for engaging across ideological, cultural, and identity-based divides.
Participants will leave with clearer language, concrete strategies for navigating charged moments, and personal commitments for strengthening community without demanding uniformity.
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| 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. | Lunch Community Session
Imagining Otherwise: Choosing Love and Connection In Uncertain Times Presented by Jasmine A. Lee, MSW, PhD Grand Ballroom USC - Session Overview
This interactive keynote weaves personal narrative, scholarship, and collective reflection to help participants ground themselves in the current social, institutional, and personal moment. It explores why radical imagination, restorative dialogue, and radical love are not optional, but essential tools for navigating uncertainty and shaping more humane futures. Participants will explore radical imagination as a collective, action-oriented practice dialogue as a bridge across difference, conflict, and disconnection, rehumanizing ourselves and one another in institutional spaces and fostering critical hope as a discipline rather than a feeling.
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| 1:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. | Civic Spotlights Presented by Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement & Public Service Continental Ballroom USC - Session Overview
Join GW's Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service for this Civic Spotlights event! Learn stories of community partnership and engagement from students in community engaged scholarship courses, social innovation projects, and co-curricular service programs.
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Concurrent Sessions Block #1: Building our Beloved Community |
| 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m. | Being Revs, Becoming Revolutionaries Presented by Quito Swan 3rd Floor USC - Room 309 - Session Overview
This session invites participants from across the University’s diverse communities to interactively and inclusively engage what it means to be a GW Revolutionary. It asks students, staff, faculty, alum, and administrative leaders to critically think through the moniker Rev in a way that honors histories and amplifies our collective charge as a community. One of the session’s central provocations is drawn from the 1983 song by Dennis Brown, Revolution, which asks, “Do you know what it means to have a revolution?” As such, what does it mean to identify oneself as a revolutionary at GW? In the context of an educational institution, how might this influence how we think, study, act, teach, research, and lead as Revs?
Empathy is Revolutionary: A Pathway to Impact & Serving the Community Presented by Lamont "Tory" Stapleton 3rd Floor USC - Room 311 - Session Overview
This sessions invites attendees to dream of the community we aspire to be and the impact we hope to make on this world. Rooted in the work of the national program Between the Lines, a program in Los Angeles that aims to build bridges between incarcerated individuals and the broader community through storytelling and mentorship, this session seeks to challenge those in attendance to reflect on their desire and motivation to be in service to others within and beyond GW. Whether through service hours, research, community organizing, entrepreneurship, and beyond, attendees will be required to identify their individual capacity for leading with empathy and cultural awareness. Attendees will be offered specific strategies and critical skills for making sustainable impact.
Resilient Community: Practical Tools for Regulation, Inclusion, and Collective Strength Presented by Natalie Hampshire Ngounou 3rd Floor USC - Room 302 - Session Overview
This interactive session offers practical tools for navigating stress and strengthening resilience within diverse communities. Centered on collective well-being and inclusion, the session explores how regulation and self-awareness support meaningful dialogue across differences. Participants engage brief demonstrations and reflective exercises designed for real-world application. Attendees leave with clear, actionable strategies to support both personal steadiness and community engagement.
Unpacking Safety, Rebuilding Trust & Imagining a Safer GW Presented by Dwayne Kwaysee Wright and Fran Buntman 3rd Floor USC - Room 308 - Session Overview
Safety in our GW community requires a shared responsibility. Safety, in this session, is inclusive of emotional, physical, and psychological safety. In the current climate, the definitions, unique needs, and perceptions of safety are complex. Often, we misunderstand or assume what safety means for people, without considering their identities, experiences, and viewpoints, along with the real conditions often influenced by systems of power that impact folks differently. This session will challenge attendees to consider safety for themselves and develop an understanding of safety for others. The session will explore strategies for fostering a safer, more inclusive, and supportive university environment.
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Concurrent Sessions Block #2: Building our Beloved Community |
| 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. | Toward One GW: Collective Power & the Social Change Ecosystem Presented by Vanice L. Antrum, M.Ed. and Shylyn "Shy" Prentice 3rd Floor USC - Rooom 311 - Session Overview
This interactive one-hour workshop introduces participants to the Social Change Ecosystem framework and explores how each of us contributes to collective movements for justice and belonging. Created by Deepa Iyer through the Building Movement Project, the framework helps us understand the distinct roles needed to sustain meaningful change. The session will help students, staff, and alumni identify where they naturally fit within systems of change, whether as builders, caregivers, disruptors, storytellers, or visionaries. Participants will reflect on the question, “Where do I begin?” and leave with clearer language around their individual strengths and roles. The workshop connects the ecosystem model to George Washington University’s broader commitment to equity, belonging, and community care on campus and beyond. Get Ready, Revolutionaries, to arm yourself with knowledge.
Co-Creating Our Future: A Community Dialogue on AI and Learning Presented by Erica Cusi Wortham, PhD and Royce Francis 3rd Floor USC - Room 309 - Session Overview
This session is an open-ended & facilitated conversation about the use of AI tools and learning. Facilitators, Dr. Royce Francis, Systems Engineer and Dr. Erica Wortham, Cultural Anthropologist, will prompt and guide an intersectional, cross disciplinary conversation to surface some of the challenges our community is facing as the learning context becomes flooded with AI tools with few guidelines. Some emphasis will be placed on bottom-up strategies for establishing frameworks and guidelines for surviving the transformation we are experiencing. Open to all attendees.
Seeing the Whole Student: Building a Coordinated Network of Contextual Care Presented by Anissa Tanksley, Beth Riley, Leanne Juzaitis, Chante Clarkson, and Rochelle Mills-Garcia 3rd Floor USC - Room 308 - Session Overview
Moderated by the Office of Advocacy and Support (OAS) and Title IX and featuring panelists from Disability Support Services (DSS), the Office of Student Success (OSS), Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), and Student Outreach and Support (SOS). This panel explores what it means to move beyond one-size-fits-all responses to students’ concerns and toward thoughtful, case-by-case support rooted in professional judgment and care. Together, we will examine how institutions can balance consistency with flexibility while maintaining academic and professional standards. Panelists will reflect on how coordination, discretion, contextual understanding, and compassion shape effective responses—particularly when students are navigating crises. We will also explore how siloed processes can unintentionally create harm, and what collaborative, cross-campus care might look like in practice. Through guided discussion, participants will consider how to reduce the burden on students to self-advocate in moments of distress and how to make a culture of support and flexibility more proactive than reactive. The conversation will also address proactive strategies: what would it mean to create a university climate with flexibility and support as a default? Attendees will leave with concrete questions and strategies for strengthening a university-wide network of care that sees, supports, and challenges students as whole people.
I Respectfully Disagree: Engaging in Civil Discourse Across Differences Moderated by Interim Provost John Lach 3rd Floor USC - Amphitheater - Session Overview
Interim Provost John Lach will moderate a panel discussion with GW community members holding different identities, perspectives, and lived experiences on engaging in civil discourse. The panel will discuss the value of civil discourse as a requirement for respectful, constructive dialogue that aims to enhance understanding, build trust, and address public concerns rather than simply winning arguments or canceling one another due to opinion or identity. Panelists will address active listening, logical, evidence-based reasoning, and mutual respect, even when engaging in deep disagreement.
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| 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. | Coming Together as OneGW: Celebrating Our Community Presented by Trinity Williams, Virginia Ali, and Award Recipients Great Hall - Session Overview
We invite you to come together at the close of the Summit to enjoy a dessert reception in community. A pillar in the DC community, Mrs. Virginia Ali - Owner of Ben's Chili Bowl - will share powerful remarks with us about community and making an impact for attendees to take as a call to action. We will award celebrate the recipients of the GW Community Impact Awards.
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