Mission & Values

The mission of the Underrepresented Student Alliance (USA) is to increase both understanding of intersectionality and allyship towards a multitude of identities.

As an organization, we aim to achieve this by:

• Increasing cultural openness amongst the student body

• Promoting education that emphasizes the importance of addressing and respecting intersectional identities

• Shifting our community narrative towards inclusion and acceptance

• Fostering conversations regarding a diverse range of identities

• Advocating for both students and members of the community

• Providing safe spaces for allyship development

• Connecting Albany Medical College to a growing student movement that recognizes ways to more formally incorporate multiple perspectives to create dialogue around those perspectives

The Underrepresented Student Alliance is committed to actively enhancing and developing the following ideals at Albany Medical College:

Identity

USA celebrates identity as an essential aspect of who each of us is, informing each of our perspectives and how we see the world around us. USA aims to create a space where individuals with all different identities, especially those that have been historically underrepresented, are visible within medicine.

Intersectionality

USA's commitment to intersectionality focuses on the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and religion, recognizing that these categories often create overlapping and interdependent systems of privilege or disadvantage. Specifically, USA views intersectionality as a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem. In this way, USA aims to take into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to create a more inclusive and equitable medical community.

Allyship

USA promotes a culture of allyship, emphasizing that it is an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group of people lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with underrepresented individuals and/or groups of people.