Graduate students play an important role in the intellectual and social fabric of our campus. They serve as bridge-builders in our classrooms, research labs, and community spaces, contributing to a culture of acceptance and belonging. This week’s Community Tips celebrates nominated graduate students at IU Bloomington who exemplify the Common Ground Collective’s core principles of Community, Acceptance, Leadership, Unlearning, and Accountability. By highlighting their stories, motivations, and the challenges they navigate, we honor the role they play in strengthening our collective IU community and inspiring us all to lead from where we are. Through their work, advocacy, and commitment to inclusion, these students are building bridges across differences and creating spaces where everyone can thrive. Their stories remind us that change happens when we invest in collective well-being and lead with intention.
Allejandra Spear, MPA Student at the O’Neill School
Allejandra Spear is a second-year MPA student at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, concentrating on nonprofit management. She is a first-generation college student raised in a hardworking Mexican-American family, and her path into public affairs has been shaped by the values that defined her upbringing: resilience, empathy, and a deep commitment to community. Throughout her life, her family ensured they had stability by providing food, a place to live, and a sense of community, even in periods of significant hardship. These experiences shaped her understanding of resilience and taught her that what many individuals seek is not simply material support, but an assurance that someone recognizes their challenges with respect and empathy.
Growing up between two different cultures made her question the pressures of assimilation and the divisions that U.S. society often imposes on marginalized communities. “Many of us hold multiple identities, yet we are told to choose one over another. I believe everyone should feel empowered to embrace the fullness of who they are and where they come from.”
These experiences have shaped her commitment to social justice, cross-cultural understanding, and community, and they guide her goal of creating nonprofit spaces that honor complexity and ensure that every person feels seen, valued, and supported.
During the summer of 2025, she joined the executive board of the newly formed Nonprofit and Civic Leadership Association (NCLA) alongside peers Lalita Durbha and Charlotte Lenkatis, with guidance from their faculty advisor, Matthew Baggetta. The association creates space for nonprofit management students with emphasis on the broader role of civil society and prepares students to lead with purpose and strengthen the common good. NCLA aims to build common ground among students with diverse backgrounds, interests, and levels of experience within the program. One of NCLA's main strategies was holding one-on-one meetings with members to learn about their experiences, interests, and concerns. Through this work, NCLA develops a membership base and organizational structure that future students will continue to build upon.
Allejandra is reminded of the challenges of creating spaces for belonging in today’s social climate, as current events show an increase in discrimination fueled by misinformation and stereotypes that reinforce one-sided narratives. In the spaces she has worked to build common ground, she learned that bridging differences requires both personal and collective accountability, which is an ongoing process that society has not yet fully normalized and one that she often finds herself challenged with.
“Building acceptance and belonging is not simply about agreement; it is also about cultivating the willingness to question assumptions, engage across perspectives, and commit to shared responsibility for the communities we hope to create.”
Allejandra has learned much about the role of community within her role as a graduate assistant at the IU First Nations Educational and Cultural Center. Her role within the center has expanded her assumptions on how we can interact with the communities that we work with.
“From an Indigenous worldview, our relationships with community look very different from what we are used to in typical work or university settings; community is understood as a network of reciprocal relationships that require care, responsibility, and humility.”
This perspective continues to shape her approach to leadership, reminding her that meaningful work begins with relationships, reciprocity, and a deep respect for the communities she hopes to support.
During her experiences, she has found that leading and building spaces for belonging are most successful when we stop performing as who we think we are supposed to be and instead stand firmly in who we are. Growing up, especially as someone from a marginalized background, she was taught to present herself in ways that would make others comfortable. Those lessons were meant to protect her, but they also taught her to hide parts of herself that were vibrant, cultural, and deeply true. She has learned that belonging cannot grow in spaces where people feel they must shrink. So, she pushes herself and others to bring forward the parts of themselves they were conditioned to tuck away.
“When we do this, especially in leadership roles, we create a quiet permission for others to do the same. Authenticity becomes a form of care. It signals that people don’t have to trade pieces of themselves to be valued. And in that kind of environment, belonging becomes possible in a way that feels real and shared.”
Jane Grady Master of Social Work/ Master of Public Health
Jane Grady is currently earning her Master of Social Work as she works toward becoming a licensed clinical therapist. She is a Hoosier and also earned her undergraduate degree from IU Bloomington in 2017 studying Human Biology, Psychology, and Anthropology. She graduated with a commission into the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps and throughout her career focused on “helping the helpers,” first as a field medical officer and later supporting national disaster response infrastructure in Washington, DC.
She returned to IU and the MSW program because she wants to be closer to helping people one-on-one using her strengths in interpersonal connections.
Building acceptance and belonging has always been fundamental to her leadership, social work, and community-building. She feels motivated to do this work because she knows what it is like to feel afraid that you won’t be accepted. She is driven to be the person she needed when she was struggling. “I think this motivation is very common among helping professionals, and when we learn to manage it well, it can become a powerful source of strength.”
Her number one tool for building common ground is enshrining core values such as having an agreed-upon set of ideals during teamwork provides a shared foundation and a standard for holding each other accountable. “When we face interpersonal conflict, ethical dilemmas, or difficult decisions, those values give us a framework to guide our actions.”
When she encounters unjust actions, those values allow her to ask, “What would be the respectful thing to do?” When she faces tough decisions, the values remind her to act with integrity. When she is overwhelmed, they remind her of the importance of selflessness. “When teams truly share common values, those values become a scaffold that supports everyone and encourages us all to live up to a higher standard.”
One of the biggest challenges she has faced in her work in acceptance and belonging is recovering from burnout. She spent her 20s working extremely hard to “earn” her value through the approval of others, both in professional and personal life. The difficult truth was that this approach led to professional success, but it also meant she built her life on a foundation of personal insecurity.
She burned out spectacularly at 30, becoming exhausted; she couldn’t go on, and the life she built on that foundation collapsed. It was painful, frightening, and involved a lot of loss. But in the aftermath, she also found something important: a clean slate.
That experience gave her the opportunity to decide what she wanted to carry into the next chapter of her life and what she needed to leave behind. She was able to return to helping others but now recognizes her own worthiness of care and support.
The most important lesson she has learned about leadership and community is that they are linked. Good leadership is good community building. For both, one must be able to listen, connect to people, build shared understanding, manifest shared purpose, and motivate those around them. Jane believes that belonging is created through small, consistent actions rather than big statements. “It happens when people feel heard, respected, and valued for who they are.” Leadership, to her, means creating conditions where people feel safe enough to show up fully and contribute to something greater. Her advice is to start with curiosity and humility.
“We will not always get it right, but if we remain willing to listen, learn, and repair when we make mistakes, we can continue building stronger and more inclusive communities. The work of belonging is ongoing, but it is also one of the most meaningful things we can do for ourselves and each other.”
Cheryl Nong and Maria Velasco, PhD students in Social Psychology. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Cheryl and Maria are both PhD students in social psychology. Cheryl was drawn to research on belonging because of her own lived experience as a queer person of color navigating predominantly- white schools and neighborhoods. Her privileged background of college-educated parents with a father who works as a researcher in the field of neuroscience motivates her to use the legitimacy and knowledge afforded by those privileges to advocate for students from all walks of life to feel like they belong in campuses, universities, and science fields.
Maria's initial motivation to work on acceptance and belonging started as a first-generation college student at the University of Southern California. As a senior in high school, her teachers warned her about the culture shock she would experience in college, but she didn’t realize how out of place it would feel until she got there and realized how few people shared or understood her lived experiences.
Cheryl and Maria are collaborating on a series of studies aimed at understanding how large-scale racial and gender disparities in STEM fields, like differences in degree attainment or GPAs, “trickle down” to individual experiences of underrepresentation in the classroom. One important question for them to explore was what specific aspects of underrepresentation relate to students’ psychological sense of representation. For this project, they focus on how representation shapes student perceptions of goal opportunities. So far, they have found that students define representation in terms of numerical representation (e.g., shared racial identity with peers or instructor) as well as features of the classroom (e.g., size, mode), instructor (e.g., feedback, sense of care), materials (e.g., accessibility, diversity), and peers (e.g., collaboration, attitudes). Students perceived more goal affordances when they felt subjectively well-represented, as well as when their classroom was estimated to be more numerically racially diverse.
One challenge they face in their work is the difficulty in obtaining a racially diverse sample of participants. The main problem they wanted to address with their research was the underrepresentation of Black and Latine students in STEM. This creates a self-sustaining issue for study recruitment: Black and Latine students are a minority population at IU. A psychological challenge they have faced is continuing to do their work, despite recent shifts away from supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and research.
A specific lesson they have learned in their work about leadership and community is the gap between research and practice. They tend to imagine academia as an isolated ivory tower that generates knowledge in a small, exclusive circle, where findings are for other academies to pick apart and enjoy, yet withheld from communities and policymakers who would benefit the most. Studying inclusion in a higher education context presents them with a unique opportunity and responsibility to immediately put their work into practice. Though they may seem small, they have their own circles of influence that they can leverage to create positive change. They understand how easy it is to feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of serious systemic injustices, especially when they are already stretched thin by their day-to-day responsibilities. But they like to think, and their data support the idea, that as educators, caring for their students and colleagues can be a meaningful act of resistance. Hopefully, it can empower them towards further action.
Cheryl and Maria know that increasing the number of Black and Latine students in higher education is outside of their purview, but there are things members of the community can do to ensure all students feel well-represented in the classroom. Throughout their project, they have been surprised to see how important the role of the instructor is in making students of all racial backgrounds feel well-represented.
“Students in our study describe instructors’ actions as 'insulating' or 'protecting' feelings of representation, even when numerical racial diversity is low. Small actions students often mentioned include making an effort to pronounce students’ names correctly, respecting pronoun use, and using inclusive language.”
Do you know a student who should be featured in a future spotlight? We invite you to email us their name and a brief note on their contributions to our campus community to coground@iu.edu.
Facilitated Sessions with Common Ground Collective
The Common Ground Collective offers facilitated sessions on belonging and acceptance in academic settings. Contact us at coground@iu.edu to request a session for your department or unit.
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