At Sunbridge Institute we are committed to serving and being a diverse, inclusive community. We are striving collectively to ensure the continued growth and development of our curriculum and program offerings to reflect these values. As we deepen our own relationship to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, we ask for your honest feedback and perspective, understanding that we wish to widen our lens and that this work is, and will always be, in process.

In June 2018, Linda Williams, PhD, Sunbridge alumna and longtime class teacher at the Detroit Waldorf School, gave a keynote presentation at the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America’s annual conference on the topic “Social Justice: Exploring Place, Race, Class, and Gender in Waldorf Education.”

In a follow-up article on that theme for the Fall/Winter 2018 issue of Renewal, Dr. Williams wrote:

It is important that Waldorf teacher education programs continue to actively promote teaching for inclusivity, diversity, and social justice in their programs and practices. These themes should be explicit and central, both in ongoing programs and in specific workshops. 

I also recommend that there be a concentrated, national effort to increase the number of teachers and administrators of color in our Waldorf schools. This step alone—to actively recruit and support teachers of color to become Waldorf teachers and administrators—would significantly increase the diversity of voices at the table.

These messages tied neatly into Sunbridge’s own ongoing and increasingly urgent conversations about what we ourselves could do to help remedy the lack of diversity within Waldorf school communities while also help all our students develop a deeper understanding of racial awareness and inclusivity.

To this end, in 2018, the Sunbridge faculty, board, and administration created the Sunbridge Institute Diversity Fund.