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Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
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Fund for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The goals of the GPS faculty fellowships
To increase the number of historically underrepresented students (African Americans, American Indians, Hispanic/Latin(x) Americans, and others) pursing graduate degrees in Geological and Planetary Sciences and Environmental Science and Engineering, and to promote the benefits of a graduate degree within academia. The GPS Faculty Fellows receive a $5,000 supplement to their stipend during their first year of graduate school. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents.

Endowments are perpetual sources of funds that make many universities able to undertake challenging activities that can be transformative in nature. The yield from endowment can fund such activities for generations to come.

The GPS faculty have done something truly extraordinary. By providing monetary resources from their personal discretionary accounts they have collectively raised $400,000. Through many individual contributions — spanning from the junior faculty, through the senior faculty, to the emeritus faculty — we achieved our target goal of $400k in a very short time. Furthermore, each of the GPS Division's major centers (Caltech Center for Comparative Planetary Evolution, Linde Center for Global Environmental Science, and the Seismological Laboratory) contributed funds that were matched by the GPS Division. Our example attracted interest from three trustee donors that added their gifts, bringing our current total above $1,000,000. This DEI Fund could only have been created as a result of the faculty's deep commitment to the future of diversity, equity and inclusion. Our example has inspired other Caltech divisions to start similar efforts.

The way Caltech endowments are managed, the annual payout is 5%, so that gives us a budget of about $50,000 each year. As a specifically directed endowed fund, with an annual payout to manage, it not only guarantees we'll have a resource for generations to come; it also ensures we won't forget the intention of the fund after the current moment, with its passions, have subsided. It will be there every year to remind us of its importance.

This new DEI Fund will enable us to offer, beginning with the next round of admissions, several 'GPS Faculty Fellowships' to eligible applicants. Those fellowships will be offered after admission and before admitted students are required to respond to admission offers, by recommendation from the Academic Committee and selection by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Furthermore, through the recommendations of the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the faculty will make decisions on how to best spend available resources for a broad variety of activities involving outreach, inreach, WAVE fellows, recruiting, and more. The entire Division community is encouraged to submit ideas to the DEI Committee for their consideration. We will need to be thoughtful and deliberative to use our available funds most wisely.