 I'm Renee Thomas, and I have the privilege of serving as director of the Purdue University Black Cultural Center. This past year, the Black Cultural Center celebrated its 50th anniversary, so we have a very long history and tradition at Purdue University. We also receive national recognition as one of the best cultural centers in our country, and we're really proud about that. The Black Cultural Center is a place where the African American experience can be explored, celebrated and shared. We provide programs and services to support our students in terms of their academic and personal identity and success at the university. We host six different performing arts ensembles in dance, drama, creative writing, choral music, as well as scholarly research. And then we also provide support services for students to thrive academically through our library collection, a 20-station computer lab. We have a marvelous art collection that I invite you to come in and see. And then finally, we also have a cultural arts series in which we invite prominent guest speakers and performers to the university for public lectures and presentations. And part of that cultural arts series also includes a research tour in which we explore various cultural sites that are relevant to the African American experience. The impact of the Black Cultural Center is tremendous. One of the things that we are very much supportive of is identity development. We know that students, particularly African American students who have a strong sense of identity and self-development, they tend to perform better academically. They tend to be retained at the university at a higher rate, and they also tend to graduate. So we know that the Black Cultural Center plays a vital role as it relates to the academic achievement and success of our students because of the identity development. And we do identity development through the arts as well. So students may be involved with the Black Voices of Inspiration. They learn about the role of traditional Negro spirituals in terms of their history and culture. We also do identity development through our guest speakers and performers that we have to the institution. And it reads like a who's who when you think about the people who have graced the campus of Purdue University because of the Black Cultural Center. Performances by the Alvin Alley Dance Theater, lecture presentations by Condoleezza Rice. Maya Angelou has been on campus and the list just goes on and on and on. But one of the things that we're committed to at the Black Cultural Center is to celebrate the African American experience and the celebration is open to all individuals to participate. And we develop the philosophy of we meet you where you are. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum in terms of self identity, we play a role in helping to educate the students and provide that sense of belonging for them. Excellence is something that all the cultural centers embrace. And for many years, cultural centers have been placed on the margins of campus, not seen as an integral part of the university campus. And again, we adopted a philosophy that we are the center of it all and that we, regardless of what the students need, whether it's academic, social or various resources, the cultural centers are a place in which students can find that. And what we found that we have moved from the margins being defined as marginalized to becoming the leading edge at our institution in terms of the innovation that the cultural centers provide. The Black Cultural Center is a place in which students' cultural identity is affirmed. We have a family atmosphere produced, you know, more than 40,000 students strong. So it really creates a community within a community in terms of that family atmosphere. And we also impact the student success. We want our students to get involved through the Performing Arts Ensemble program. They can become a member of one of our various ensembles. They can get involved by attending a BCC-sponsored program. They can also get involved by just utilizing the center in terms of a study place with the computer lab and or library operations. So there's a variety of ways for students to get involved and we benefit tremendously from the student interaction as well. Like the other cultural centers host an annual welcome back celebration and welcome to we call it BoilerFest, which is our new student orientation program. And which we invite a variety of multicultural student organizations to have tables so that they can introduce themselves to the students who attend the BoilerFest program. We also have VIP speakers such as yourself, Dr. Gates, letting students know that they need to move from a position of I'm surviving to I am thriving at this institution. We also invite our local vendors who are minority owned businesses to be represented, including barbershops and salons. Most of the time students want to know where can I get my hair done? Where can I do this? And the Black Cultural Center BoilerFest program provides that we are currently exploring the way in which we want to provide that opportunity virtually to students. Because we know that we have physical distancing that will be in place this fall. So we will have some sort of BoilerFest program we're currently pivoting now to determine exactly what that will look like. We're doing tribute and commemoration to Dr. Martin Luther King for decades now and which we have historically invited a guest speaker or performer to the University to remind students of the significant contributions that Dr. King made. We also have a service component. Each year we have about 400 students who volunteer to spend a half a day out in community based organizations. We call it a day on as opposed to a day off in which they volunteer their service for the commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.