The Puente Project strives to be anti-racist and culturally sustaining as we serve the diverse communities of California and beyond. We stand with Black and Indigenous students and educators as we commit to addressing anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity within our Latinx communities and beyond. The Puente Project welcomes students of all races, ethnicities, cultures, and nationalities with the recognition that centering Black and Indigenous experiences makes liberation for all possible. We assert that everyone has a right to feel seen and that all educational professionals have a duty to provide this welcoming atmosphere. We stand with immigrants and refugees, recognizing our responsibility to safeguard the dignity and rights of our communities. Our priorities include advocacy, fostering cross-cultural communication, and storytelling in service of community care and resilience. In practice, this means prioritizing collectivism and interdependence, affirming the value of cultural ways of knowing and being, supporting connection with ancestral lineages of wisdom and healing, and advocating for rights to safety and services in our campus communities and beyond. 

• Build in flexibility to the calendar and syllabus. Encourage students to bring in topics, texts, and ideas which relate to your courses/events. 

• Instead of reading the syllabus to students, allow them to annotate the syllabus together either in person or on-line. Be responsive to their questions and ideas, even if significant changes cannot be made until the next term. 

• Offer students multiple ways of demonstrating learning. Consider multimodal versions of existing assignments. Can one essay instead be a photo essay with an artist statement? Video? Play? Poetry? Music? Dance? Invite students to show you what they learned in ways that are authentic to them, at least once each term. Engage them in dialogue about their learning from a position of curiosity and enthusiasm.