Students participating in i-Unite this year will be encouraged to “create the world that we imagine.”

i-Unite is an annual week-long affair organized by the Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Relations that aims to educate and to embrace differences within the campus community. A variety of events are scheduled throughout the week; i-Unite events kicked off Saturday and will continue through Friday. Events range from films to guest speakers and take place all over campus.

“We’re trying to give people an opportunity to think and talk about ways to make the world a place that’s better for all of us,” said January Boten, an area coordinator for student affairs. “We’re working to bring people that are going to spark in people’s minds ways in which they can be inclusive toward each other.”

The film series being shown this week, which begins Wednesday in the Illini Union Courtyard Cafe, was a new addition to i-Unite in 2014. Boten said the films were successful in drawing interest from a wider range of students who normally wouldn’t go out of their way to participate in the weeklong events.

Another change to this year’s itinerary is the addition of a second guest speaker. Dr. Bernard LaFayette, a civil rights activist who was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, will be speaking on Tuesday at noon at the University YMCA and at 7 p.m. in the SDRP multipurpose room of the Ikenberry Commons.

The second speaker is Dr. Milo Dodson, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Irvine Counseling Center and an advocate for service-based leadership. 

Dodson is scheduled to speak on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the SDRP multipurpose room.

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