Community, Culture and Inclusion Shine at OneGW Community Summit

Ben's Chili Bowl, the iconic Washington, D.C. restaurant in the U Street corridor neighborhood once known as "Black Broadway," has been a city landmark for almost 70 years. Its luminary customers have included Martin Luther King Jr., Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama. In April 1968, during the unrest that followed King's assassination, Ben's was the only local business open after curfew, serving neighbors, first responders, activists and city officials alike.

For Virginia Ali, who co-founded the restaurant in 1958 with her late husband Ben Ali, that last point was perhaps the most important. Ben's Chili Bowl has always been a space for connection between people, Ali told an audience at the George Washington University last Friday. And as the events of 1968 demonstrated, the Alis and their restaurant made a point of being present for the community in return.

"We never closed except Christmas Day and Thanksgiving Day-we were always there," Ali said. "It could snow, it could rain, it could do whatever it had to do…we became a very dependable place."

That focus on community made Ali, now 92, a fitting speaker to feature at GW's OneGW Summit: Community, Culture and Inclusion. The two-day event was packed with workshops, panels and an opening festival at which students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members celebrated diversity and inclusion, told their stories, encountered new perspectives, shared common resources, took time for self-care and embraced the power of difference.

Ali was always interested in people, she said in her address at the summit's closing reception. She enjoyed her first job in D.C. as a bank teller because of the many interesting customers and stories she encountered at her window, she said. (One of those customers was her husband-to-be, who made up his mind to pursue her after visiting the bank to make a deposit.) Ben's would become a neighborhood touchstone not just because the food was delicious, but because its owners prioritized connection and were guided by sincere curiosity and respect for all people.

"Growing up, my dad taught us that when you treat everybody the way you want to be treated, you'll never have a problem," Ali said.

The summit's colorful opening OneGW Community Festival featured food, swag, community crocheting and performances, along with remarks from Ganiyat Adeduntan, head coach of the women's basketball team, and Lamont Franking, assistant coach of the men's basketball team. Graduate student Kayla Laws, one of three community storytellersfeatured during the summit, also shared her story.

Two days of connection and engagement

After the opening festival on the summit's first day, the second day began with a community sound bath, led by DC's Sounds of Gratitude, along with guided meditation. A morning keynote was presented by Lamont "Tory" Stapleton, founder and executive director of Between the Lines, a Los Angeles nonprofit organization that aims to build bridges between incarcerated individuals and the broader community through storytelling and mentorship. Tory shared that community is a fundamental need, and emphasized how necessary it is to move through this world believing every human deserves respect, love and care.

Jamie Washington, president and founder of Washington Consulting Group, then led an interactive session, "Courageous Community: Holding Tension, Building Trust," which invited members of the GW community into an honest, structured dialogue about what community means in a politically engaged and often polarized campus environment. Attendees connected through a summit "high-five buddy" and dug deeper into meaningful conversation across different perspectives and lived experiences.

During "Imagining Otherwise: Choosing Love and Connection In Uncertain Times," a lunchtime workshop and keynote led by UMBC Associate Vice President for Community and Culture Jasmine A. Lee, participants explored the critical importance of imagination, love, belonging and hope, not as abstract ideals, but as essential leadership and community practices foundational to a more humane world.

Systems of oppression are designed to atomize and alienate, encouraging us to think of those who are different as incomprehensible, lesser or dangerous, Lee said. Under these systems, when we try to imagine a better future, our solutions may be constrained by a limited perspective about who deserves to be part of that future with us.

But radical imagination is necessarily collective, Lee said, relying on many different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds. It may feel difficult at first to integrate complex ideas and beliefs that may not align with our own, but the practice opens new vistas of possibility, new possible worlds in which liberation and wholeness are available to all.

Radical imagination also brings the creation of those worlds into the present, because it "requires us to imagine actions that we can take today that cultivate the kind of future that we want to see," Lee said. It requires approaching everyone as a human being with a full share of human dignity and treating them accordingly. And it challenges us to approach hope not as an emotion, dependent on circumstance, but as a daily practice-looking directly at the world we live in, with all its ills and injustices, and choosing to believe that, together, we can build something better.

"We are leaning in to saying, 'Even when I can't see a silver lining, I choose to believe that there is one, and I choose to believe that the actions I take today can actually get me to the future that I hope for," Lee said.

Lee also said she noticed how the deep, intentional work of building and running the summit by Associate Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement Jordan Shelby West and summit volunteers created "good soil" in which to cultivate these critical practices.

"I saw people engage deeply, I saw them thinking deeply, I overheard them asking each other really critical questions, and at the end of the session a few folks came up to me after and named things that stood out to them in really meaningful ways," Lee said. "Overall, I saw the GW community engage not just with my session, but with the entire conference."

Stitching together community

Throughout the second day, the third floor of the University Student Center was lined with tables representing GW community partners invested in community, culture and inclusion. Among these were Brianna Attey Mouanjo, B.A. '25, now a master's student in human resource management at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and Taiwo Oseni, a senior majoring in public health, who guided attendees in weaving a shared thread-literally-through the summit.

The duo was invited to lead the "Community Crochet," a textile project ongoing throughout the summit. Each person who stopped by their table was invited to create a small crochet square using colored yarn with a meaning that resonated with them: pink for empathy, yellow for curiosity, green for patience and blue for care. The squares will be assembled into a single tapestry, representing the many participants who come together to make "one GW."

The project was an interactive way for people to learn from students, challenge themselves, engage in a project together, learn about the cultural and traditional roots of crochet and more.

Attey and Oseni said that for them, crocheting has been meaningful as a grounding, meditative activity with a concrete outcome. For Attey, it has also provided a healing escape from the trap of perfectionism.

"As adults, we can lose the ability to give ourselves grace" when approaching new or difficult tasks, she said. Participants in Community Crochet might see contributing their square not only as an educational and social project in itself, but as a microcosm of the complex and sometimes challenging yet deeply rewarding work of creating community.

How do we disagree respectfully?

Friday afternoon featured two blocks of concurrent sessions on "Building Our Beloved Community" with which attendees could engage. These included "Toward One GW: Collective Power & the Social Change Ecosystem," an interactive workshop led by Multicultural Student Services CenterDirector Vanice L. Antrum and Assistant Director Shylyn "Shy" Prentice; and "Co-Creating Our Future: A Community Dialogue on AI and Learning," an intersectional, cross-disciplinary conversation led by the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Director of Co-curricular Engagement and Interdisciplinary Programs Erika Cusi Wortham and Associate Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Royce Francis.

Another afternoon session was "Respectfully Disagree: Engaging in Civil Discourse Across Differences," a conversation with student, faculty and administrator panelists moderated by Interim Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs John Lach.

"The more contentious an issue is, the more important civil discourse is," Lach said. Civility allows a community "to disagree respectfully and to leverage the beauty of difference to work together toward a better world."

Chloe Blackburn, a senior in the Elliott School of International Affairs and president of Alianza, urged fellow panelists and the audience to examine the roots of incivility-the material harms and unbalanced power dynamics that, while not always made explicit, underlie many "uncivil" interactions. Indeed, she said, an institution may struggle to credibly promote civil discourse until it has examined and unpacked its own position among these root incivilities.

"We can't expect folks to act civil as they are enduring acts of incivility," Blackburn said.

GW College RepublicansPresident Kieran Laffey, a junior political science major, said right-leaning members of the GW community sometimes fear sharing their opinions at the risk of social blowback. But when less-popular political viewpoints cannot be expressed, he said, those in the majority lose the "opportunity and challenge" of having their own ideas contested.

"The best conclusions come from free and fair debate," Laffey said.

Fundamental to any conversation, especially one involving opposing views, is respect for both your own and your opponent's humanity, said Derek Malone-France,an associate professor of world religion and director of GW's Peace Studies Program. That means an acceptance of shared complexities, hopes, fears and imperfections-a tall order in the face of frightening news in the world and polarizing rhetoric on social media. Still, Malone-France said, universities must remain a safe space for students from all points of the political compass to defend their positions, experiment with new ones, make mistakes and change their minds.

In order to "create space in the classroom for these kinds of conversations," Malone-France said, he begins the semester by explicitly clarifying that "whatever your views, as long as you state them in a way that doesn't openly disrespect other people in the classroom, they will be respected by the other people in the classroom."

Emily Hammond, interim vice provost for faculty affairs, advocated for GW's Center for Teaching Excellenceas a resource for faculty members looking to facilitate that kind of respectful conflict.

"When we're in a community where everybody's connected, where people trust that they're valued for their own humanity and are able to offer reciprocity to others, it allows people to enter the brave spaces where learning happens and where bigger and better ideas and creativity open up," Hammond said.

Honoring community builders

At the summit's closing reception, West presented GW's first ever Community Impact Awards. Awardees were nominated by members of the GW community for making a significant, sustainable and positive impact on the lives of others at GW and in the D.C. area and for embodying the values represented by GW's strategic framework.

The awardees were Virginia Ali; community partners representing restaurants in Milken Institute SPH's FRESH Initiative; alumni Naseem Haamid, B.A. '21, and Owen Manning, B.B.A. '21; undergraduate student Sofiia Khugaeva, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and health equity; staff member Ronnie Webb, Jr., community engagement manager in the Center for Community Resilience; and faculty member Erin Wentzell, assistant professor of health, human function and rehabilitation sciences in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

West said she hoped attendees, inspired by the stories they'd heard and learning throughout the summit, would feel responsible to "do the next right thing, whatever that might be-the thing that you care most deeply about, the thing that keeps you up at night."

"I ask that you take care of this community, that you determine your role in this community and in making this community just a little bit better," she said.