DDI Good News | March 2025
Welcome!
We’re happy to welcome Julissa Gonzalez, the new HEOP Assistant Program Director! She is a big supporter of students and is passionate about their success. She most recently worked as a social worker and DASA Coordinator for Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School in Rochester. She has nine years of higher education experience at Monroe Community College where she served as an advisor/coach for underrepresented students. She has an MSW from SUNY Brockport, a BS in social work from Keuka College, and an AS in human services from MCC. She started in her new position at RIT last month, February 24th.
MCAS Celebrates Winter
What a great turnout! Close to 100 students braved Rochester’s winter weather, grabbed a paintbrush and got to work creating their own artwork on canvas at the “Paint and Sip Cocoa for FreezeFest! This event was hosted on campus through a partnership with MCAS and the Student Conduct Office. It included a custom coco bar with all the fixings! Marykatherine Woodson, director of the Multicultural Center for Academic Success says,” MCAS is excited to continue engaging with students in fun and creative ways!”
Congratulations to Devon Watters, assistant director for Marketing and Communications! She has accepted a position as the new Associate Director of Creative for the Division of Finance and Administration, effective March 17th. She has been an important, integral part of the DDI Marcom Team for 10 years, starting just after she graduated from RIT.
We’re celebrating Women’s History Month and we asked our DDI colleagues this question: who inspires you?
Alexandria Collins assistant director for MCAS: Student Development,
“I love this question about inspiration. I will go off what I put on my vision board this year. My inspiration is women, minority women, Black women, women who have a struggle and seek to overcome through the perseverance and for the fight of the elevation of their family. This is not a particular woman because it’s so many – women in my home and in my family like my mom and sister, women in work, you and all the work you’ve done, women in politics, women in stores whose stories I hear and so on. There is no limit. I look to women for all I do in life.”
Taj Smith executive director for Culture and Diversity Education/adjunct, Women, Gender and Sexualities Studies
My mom, Pam, inspires me. As a woman and single parent for most of my life, she has sacrificed a great deal to support her three children. I don't know how she raised my siblings and I on her income level. Before she retired, she never made more than $47,000 a year. I have no children and an income that almost doubles and money burns through my digital wallet. The kind of perseverance, creativity and innovation it took to keep a roof over our heads in northern New Jersey and the food on the table is quite amazing.
A good parent also provides you with safety, and for my mom that literally could have cost her life. Besides navigating three pregnancies, my mom scared away a person looking to rob her using a gun. She was in the process of taking my siblings and I out of the car after finishing up some errands. I was about 6 years old. She yelled, "Are you crazy! I'm trying to take these kids out of the car." Luckily, gun violence wasn't as normalized, and the person decided to run away.
Even in retirement my mom is providing me with a blueprint on how to approach that period of life. She refuses to just stay at home and wither away. She stays active by attending weekly senior citizen activities, checking in on her sisters, traveling via cruises, and reading books which she never had time for when I was growing up. It is quite interesting to have political conversations with her nowadays. She gets so fired up! Today, this woman without a college degree has the time to learn. Something that for much of her life she had to sacrifice because her children came first.
Will Walker associate director Rochester City Scholars, MCAS
“My inspiration for Women's History Month comes from Dr. Kathleen Cleaver. While learning of her history, and all she did for the Black Panther Party and the “Black is Beautiful” movement, I was able to meet and spend time with her throughout her visit to my undergraduate university. The way she carried herself, unapologetically “Black and Proud” made a profound impact on how I wanted to view myself. It supercharged my urge to work through and untangle internalized -isms that served to inhibit me from being authentic to not only the world, but to myself as well.”