The second season of Conversations for Change will feature casual conversations with some of the University of Michigan’s brightest students, faculty, and leaders and best.
Yaqub Ahmedfiqi, second-year University of Michigan student, joins Conversations for Change host and #UMSocial intern Cam Turner to talk about Expect Respect, an organization on campus that is focused on creating and maintaining a positive, respectful and inclusive campus environment.
“Expect Respect really is a collaboration effort. It’s the entire campus body — students, faculty, and staff — working together to ask people questions and provide educational materials (about campus). By providing all these educational materials, we hope that people will take that and run with it and really, you know, create the change that they want to see,” Ahmedfiqi says.
They also discuss what campus climate means and why it is important to measure.
“It’s the temperature of how students feel when they’re interacting with the campus around them.. that’d be the buildings that we have here, other students, faculty, staff, things along that nature,” he says.
“We want to promote a campus climate where everyone feels like not only safe, but respected at the same time.”
Ahmedfiqi says there are many ways to show respect, but they all start with being open-minded. He encourages more people to have conversations, to learn more about others, and to really listen.
“Respect is really just that open-mindedness when it comes to meeting new people, being willing to have conversations, and the reason why you want to have those conversations, because at the end of the day, regardless of what you believe in, I respect you as a human being,” he says.
