Diversity & Inclusion

To attract applicants of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, we have dedicated HMI’s endowment draw exclusively to supporting need-based financial aid. This is in addition to the more than 20% of our budget that goes towards financial aid each year. All told, around 30% of our Semester and Summer Term students receive need-based financial aid.

Our financial aid packages go well beyond covering just the cost of tuition. Depending on the needs of families, financial aid awards can include the following: 

• Free or reduced-price outdoor gear rental
• Roundtrip airfare to Colorado
• HMI-sponsored medical insurance 
• Travel for family members to attend Family Weekend

In the coming years, our next major fundraising effort will be dedicated to funding our equity initiatives, including increasing the percentage of our budget we are able to commit to financial aid.

In an effort to expand the diversity of our applicant pool and student body, we are changing the way we recruit. In recent years, we have built and strengthened relationships with nearly two dozen public schools, charter schools, and educational-access nonprofits across the country. These organizations help us connect with students who otherwise would never have found our school. Additionally, we now offer admissions webinars targetted towards students of color and their families. 

Finally, the HMI Admissions Office has never been more welcoming to Spanish-speaking families. Both Admissions Director Ray McGaughey and Admissions Officer Lupe Bobadilla are fluent in Spanish and families can now access a Spanish version of our website and participate in Spanish language admissions presentations. 

Since 2019, a taskforce of HMI staff and faculty has worked to improve hiring practices and increase candidate diversity in our hiring pools. HMI partners with a number of minority recruiting agencies, including Strategenius and Nemnet in order to recruit more employees of color. We are posting open positions on a wider range of job sites, and auditing each position description before it is posted to ensure they are culturally welcoming to people of all backgrounds. 

We are also focusing our efforts on ensuring that average tenure for employees of color is as long–if not longer–than that of our white employees. Among other initiatives, we have committed extra resources towards professional development and mentorship opportunities for employees of color.

Finally, we recently changed the model of our Apprentice Program from a tuition-based program to a paid one. By compensating apprentices we aim to break down barriers of access to outdoor education and diversify our adult population.

In fall 2021 Lupe Bobadilla began working as HMI’s first Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. As a member of the administrative leadership team, Lupe reports directly to the head of school. Among other iniatives, Lupe has worked to implement all-staff inclusion trainings, audit wilderness and academic curicula for bias, and strengthen our faculty-led affinity spaces. 

HMI is a founding member of the Colorado Diversity Network, a network of independent schools devoted to teacher professional development around equity and inclusion, and we have doubled our professional development budget to provide more opportunities for our teachers to engage in this work.

Each year we send employees to the NAIS Diversity Leadership Institute or the Diversity Directions Independent School Seminar. Since 2020 all HMI employees of color have been eligible and encouraged to attend NAIS’ People of Color Conference. 

Even though attending these multi-day conference-style trainings is something that our team highly values, for many reasons, not all employees are able to take advantage of these types of trainings each year. Recognizing this, we have dedicated time and resources to bringing professional trainers on diversity, equity, and inclusion to our campus for mandatory all-staff training days.

In addition to these formal trainings and workshops, we coordinate our own internal trainings in order to better equip our team to handle difficult conversations around bias, inclusion, and equity.

We have added responsibilities concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion to every employee’s job description as well as our annual staff self-evaluation questions. Additionally, we have begun including this as an area of evaluation for all staff by their supervisors.

We are committed to doing the difficult work of identifying and unlearning the biases we each hold as individuals. Step by step, our team is creating a culture of shutting down exclusionary behavior when we see it in our community.

Each semester cohort participates in our “Identity Series”. This is an on-campus biweekly facilitated community meeting where all students are encouraged to share personal stories and explore how the various identities present in our semester shape our community.

Students also have access to two faculty-led affinity spaces on campus, the People of Color affinity group, and Q² (Queer & Questioning). 

HMI has renovated facilities, reorganized student groupings on backpacking expeditions, and made preparations to welcome students all along the gender spectrum to our school. With the opening of our new Student and Faculty Center in summer 2022 we have greatly increased the number of gender-neutral bathrooms on our campus.

We are auditing all of our academic, leadership, and community curricula and making changes to better promote cultural inclusion. Below are just a few examples of what these changes look like:

• On expeditions, we learn about the history of the land on which we recreate. We discuss land acknowledgments to spark conversations about land ownership and management and to cultivate a stronger, more historically accurate sense of place in the wilderness.
• In math class, our teachers highlight mathematicians from underrepresented backgrounds each week and lead students in discussions about the ways we socially construct what it means to be “good at math” in order to broaden the ways students see themselves and others as mathematicians.
• In Practices & Principles: Ethics of the Natural World, we explore the intersectionality of identity and the outdoors throughout all of our topics yet perhaps most directly in units such as “Defining Wilderness” and “Access and Inclusivity in Outdoor Recreation.” Here are a few examples the texts that our students explore in this class:

1. “The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon paired with “1492” by Charles Mann and “Black Women in Wilderness” by Evelyn White
2. “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History” by Carolyn Merchant
3. NPR’s Code Switch podcast: Being ‘Outdoorsy’ When You’re Black Or Brown
4. It Matters Who You See in Outdoor Media by Carolyn Finney for Outside Magazine
5. We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us. by Latria Graham for Outsize Magazine
6. Five Ways to Make the Outdoors More Inclusive by The Atlantic / REI

The following priorities are copied directly from our current Strategic Plan which was approved by the board in Fall 2019:

Strategic Goal #1: Advance our efforts in diversity, access, equity, and inclusion

Building a diverse and inclusive community is central to our mission. We cannot help our students grow into leaders, independent thinkers, and thoughtful citizens if our student body matriculates from like backgrounds, cultures, and ways of thought. HMI must also be a true home for all students—one where all students have access to the promise of our mission. 

Therefore, we have outlined the following strategic priorities: 

1) Define the approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion work that aligns with HMI’s mission and educational philosophy while helping meet the goals of our DEI statement. Increase economic diversity of the student body, first and foremost in the HMI Semester.

2) Ensure all students have excellent and comparable experiences, including those from traditionally underrepresented populations at HMI. 

3) Diversify our employee, apprentice, and board populations, especially in terms of racial and ethnic diversity. 

4) Construct new facilities with gender inclusive accommodations.