The ALANA Cultural Center provides workshops and training that focus on building inclusive communities, understanding and appreciating difference, developing skills to talk about challenging topics, and increasing advocacy. The center’s workshops can be tailored to students, staff, or faculty groups. It can also customize workshops on topics not listed below.
Learning From Experiential Games and Workshops
The ALANA Cultural Center offers a variety of facilitated games that are designed to be both fun and challenging. These games are unique opportunities to engage participants in learning about themselves, challenging their own implicit biases in a forgiving space. An ALANA staff member must be present to facilitate these experiential games. They are great options for student organizations, small classes, department staff, and anyone looking to have fun and learn about themselves. Contact the ALANA Cultural Center to learn more about the options.
(2-hour interactive workshop)
Student leadership at Colgate involves responsibility not only for outcomes, but for how decisions and actions affect diverse communities. This workshop helps student leaders understand accountability as a practice rooted in effective process, trust, transparency, and community care.
Participants learn how to create accountability maps and logistics to guide people through on commitments, address challenges when harm or miscommunication occurs, and build cultures where teams support one another's growth. Participants leave with strategies to build trust, repair missteps, and create team cultures grounded in shared responsibility.
Effective Communication and Difficult Conversations
Student communities include people with diverse perspectives shaped by culture, identity, and personal experiences. This workshop helps leaders navigate disagreements and difficult conversations with empathy and clarity. Participants practice communication tools that support respectful dialogue, active listening, and conflict navigation. The workshop also addresses how identity and lived experience influence how messages are received and interpreted. Student leaders gain strategies to engage across differences while maintaining relationships and community trust.
This workshop is an exploratory, introductory discussion on Allies and Advocates on Colgate Campus. As the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion deepens, it is necessary to develop a practical understanding of the roles of allies and advocates, and how to use privilege to advance the goal of equity and inclusion for everyone. In this workshop, we aim to explore the functional necessity of allies and advocates and how to turn good intentions into impactful actions. This session is recommended for participants who have already participated in the Implicit Bias, Beyond Implicit Bias, and Critical Whiteness workshop.
The Beyond Implicit Bias workshop focuses on having participants interrogate their own biases, where these biases come from, what biased practices look like both on the individual and structural level, microaggressions, stereotypes, and making more informed decisions, through dialogue and case studies. This session is recommended for participants who have already participated in the Implicit Bias workshop.
The Critical Whiteness workshop will explore how race functions systemically and often in subconscious ways to privilege people with certain skin traits. attempts to help people of all races think critically about how race functions systemically and often subconsciously to privilege people with certain perceived skin traits. This session is recommended for participants who have already participated in the Implicit Bias and Beyond Implicit Bias workshop.
This workshop introduces participants to the idea of cultural humility, which describes a model for interacting with other cultures in a way that is open, rather than focusing on being all knowing or achieving competence. This workshop promotes open dialogue across cultures, understanding of self in order to understand our interactions with others, and exploration of how bias manifests for each of us. Participants will explore ways to move past the shame of bias or privilege and instead learn to be open to others who may share different cultural identities than themselves.
This workshop builds on Cultural Humility, and begins to tackle the first tenet of Cultural Humility: lifelong learning and self-evaluation. Participants begin with a “cultural sketch” of self that delves deep into how their identities play into the ways they see the world and consider how these views have impacted their life decisions. Participants will begin to examine how certain identities fit into privileged and non-privileged models and how they can use that information to inform how they can empower and advocate for others.
Student leaders frequently navigate competing needs, limited resources, and complex group dynamics. This workshop introduces practical strategies to help leaders make thoughtful decisions that consider diverse perspectives and community impact.
Using team work's idea generation process, decision-making, identifying root causes of challenges, and collaborating across differences to generate solutions. The workshop highlights how identity, experiences, and power dynamics shape decisions and outcomes. Participants gain tools to move from reactive responses toward thoughtful, inclusive, and mission-aligned solutions.
Collaborations often fail not because of lack of interest, but because expectations, goals, and responsibilities are unclear. This workshop helps student leaders design partnerships that lead to meaningful outcomes. Participants explore how to establish shared goals, values, clarify roles, and navigate power and resource differences across collaborating groups. Using examples from campus partnerships, leaders learn how to sustain collaborations beyond single events. Participants gain strategies to build partnerships that are intentional, equitable, and impactful for diverse communities.
Student leaders often face situations involving fairness, representation, and responsibility. This workshop encourages leaders to examine how ethical leadership influences trust and organizational culture. Participants engage in discussions around ethical dilemmas common to their groups, including pressures and opportunities, decision transparency, inclusion in decision-making, and responsible representation of communities. Leaders reflect on how personal values influence leadership choices. Participants leave with tools to make decisions grounded in fairness, integrity, and community responsibility.
The Implicit Biases workshop focuses on raising awareness of unconscious biases and the steps that individuals can take to prevent attitudes and behaviors from interfering with decisions and interactions. The workshop explores the concepts of implicit bias, depicts different types of implicit biases, and explores the relationship between implicit bias, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and preventing discrimination. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with a better understanding of basic terms, theories, and concepts related to social justice work. Participants of this workshop are recommended to continue their learning with social justice activism by taking Beyond Implicit Bias, Critical Whiteness, and Beyond Allyship: The Roles of Allies and Advocates in Equity and Inclusion workshops.
Intergroup Dialogue (IDG) is an educational model that brings together community members from diverse social identities in a cooperative, small-group learning environment. The ALANA Cultural Center is heavily invested in this work that spans across the University, and provides supervision, along with the IGD Council, to two student interns.
This workshop is a great way to begin a retreat or get a group talking about diversity and what it means to them individually. Participants will use a soccer ball with diversity questions written on it to facilitate deeper discussion about modern day issues in diversity. The aim of this workshop is to create a space in which participants get to practice talking and reflecting on equity and inclusivity. This workshop can be used as an icebreaker for any of our other workshops, added on to a diversity, equity, and inclusion related speaker or other event, or can be done alone with a debrief at the end.
The Social Justice 101 workshop is a great experience for those seeking to build a foundational knowledge of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with a better understanding of basic terms, theories, and concepts related to social justice work. This workshop is a great for those new to the work and those wanting a refresher.
Student organizations bring together individuals with different motivations, communication styles, cultural backgrounds, and leadership experiences. This workshop helps leaders understand how to motivate and support teams where members engage differently and how to meet where people are.
Participants explore strategies for delegation, engagement, and recognizing contributions in ways that honor diverse experiences and leadership readiness levels. Leaders also examine how burnout, academic pressures, and personal responsibilities affect participation. Participants leave with practical tools to build motivated, collaborative teams where members feel valued and empowered to contribute.
The Thriving in a Multicultural Environment workshop focuses on intercultural skills that help individuals to thrive in a multicultural environment. The training explores strategies and opportunities to evaluate one's skills to work with others from different backgrounds and ethnicities.