The Psychology Department’s Psychology Graduate Students for Inclusivity (PGSI) and the faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committee hosted a hybrid Psychology Outreach Extravaganza event this Fall, as the culmination of local summer service. The event served as a celebration of recent local partnerships formed both within the department and our local Philadelphia community.

The Psychology Outreach Extravaganza represents an exciting and ongoing collaboration between the faculty (through the DEI Committee) and student-led (PGSI) organizations, which are dedicated to making psychological science within Temple and beyond more accessible and welcoming to individuals of all backgrounds. Members of both branches hope to share in future community-building, strengthened by one another to reach shared goals. The department made huge strides developing partnerships with our local Philadelphia community and in doing so, extended our service efforts throughout the past year.

We celebrated these efforts at the Outreach Extravaganza. In September 2021, 7 departmental “teams” composed of lab members, faculty, and administrators presented information on the local organizations that they partnered with, including Urban Creators, Philabundance, and Puentes de Salud. The program fostered a space to let trainees, staff, and faculty work together to contribute to local partner organizations’ creative solutions to prescient problems facing our local community, including the opioid epidemic, food/housing needs, and mental health interventions in vulnerable populations. These efforts were especially exciting as many of them represented the first cultivation of longer partnerships with local organizations.

Members of the psychology department partnered together and worked to support local non-profit organizations, resulting in an impressive range of creative service, from a Wii Bowl-a-thon fundraiser to free educational presentations. Who knew a group of research scientists could develop such creative interventions?

The event not only represented a connection between our local Temple community and the broader Philadelphia one, but also served as a space for our community to get to know one another better. Between presentations, attendees of the extravaganza played games like Lab Charades, debated ‘the most important psychologist’, and shared cute animal videos. “It was a wonderful opportunity to meet so many fun people from so many different labs.” said research assistant Ian O’Shea.

The DEI committee and PGSI hope to keep this tradition running in the department. keep your eyes open for next year's event, which we are in the midst of planning!