The University of West Los Angeles (UWLA) is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts as outlined in the California State Bar's Report.

UWLA was founded on the principal of democratization of the practice of law in 1966, that proposition held that the profession of lawyers should match the communities that they serve.

This has been continuously upheld by UWLA to this day through its current Mission, Vision, and Values:

University of West Los Angeles is a family. Our culture of diversity creates a unique equitable educational empowerment environment. We provide opportunities for resilient learners to become servant leaders to their communities.

FEEL Definition - FEEL an experience (an emotion or sensation).

Our Family value of interpersonal relationships requires that we care for and treat all *members of our community in a constructive but honest and respectful manner.

*members of our community are all who share our values.

Our value of Equity encompasses diversity and inclusion, it requires that we support each member based upon their unique needs for support and gives them fair access to educational empowerment. UWLA affirms its position as an antiracist institution.

Educational Empowerment adds to and refines the members of our communities’ existing capacity and knowledge with the creation of opportunities for professional development and social mobility.

Irrespective of titles or names, the value of Leadership is the ability to bring about transformative change from vision to completion, while at the same time remaining a humble lifelong learner.

Our institution created the Dean of Transformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, position institutionally to develop these initiatives further. The Dean is charged with helping formulate, implement, and evaluate our DEI plan. Our DEI efforts are designed to help create a more inclusive "Workplace Culture." Our plan will address the specific objectives and criteria recommended by the State Bar's "Call to Action." We understand the recommendations made in the report do not include all areas of DEI work and will strengthen our plan with additional objectives, metrics, and pertinent information.

 UWLA will continue to build upon its opportunity mission by intentionally eliminating barriers to success for all of our students. We recognize the apparent disparity in the success of the underrepresented demographics as evidenced in the State Bars Diversity Report Card. Our intuitions diversity efforts have addressed each of the social justice past models and movements dating back to 1966. The prior and current initiatives taken by our faculty, staff, administrators, and community stakeholders resulted from visionary leaders at each level committed to equity.

Examples of our initiatives include holding town halls to openly discuss race, racism, and equity, participating in community social justice forums, regularly conducting employee and student surveys, expanded staffing, investing in training, policy updates, collecting demographic information and disaggregating the data, faculty evaluation revisions, improved hiring practices, refined hiring procedures and policies, updating outdated policies and practices, promoting mental health awareness, creating a calendar of DEI events coinciding with our marketing efforts, consistent communication with students, assessing bar passage rates for potential biases, tracking and examining disciplinary disparities for racial/ethnic variances, barriers and trends, conducting analyses of lessons learned from the hybrid and remote adaptations, acquiring judicial partnerships, strongly supporting the pipeline to practice need by implementing innovative approaches towards inclusivity and opportunity, in depth student and staff interviews from disproportionately impacted groups , incorporating implicit biases education in our curriculum, increased leadership opportunities, increased resources for area's directly impacting DEI transparency, identifying meaningful DEI trends, holding regular staff meetings promoting a sense of belonging, promoting student and staff advocacy, creation of a "Student Ambassador" program, and actively working towards formulating a plan that aligns with our vision of "Liberation Through Educational Empowerment."

In conclusion, we recognize DEI efforts tend to trend when our nation experiences significant traumatic events. We recognize attitudinal changes alone are not enough to create substantive changes in an organization's culture; nevertheless, the climate of an institution may be greatly affected by these events, and we aim to build a more inclusive culture from the recent momentum. Our ultimate goal is to build a sustainable plan independent of temporary emotional commitments; rather, we strive to honor the legal profession and the principles upon which this great nation was founded, "Justice For All."