What is your vision on inclusiveness?

This initiative aims to foster a stronger sense of belonging and community among colleagues through low-threshold, easily accessible activities. It will launch with the LGBTQ+ staff community as its starting point, with the explicit intention of expanding to other groups within FEB over time.

In practice, the plan is for two informal, activity-based meet-ups per academic year, with open and flexible participation so staff can join as their schedules allow. It is set to begin within the 2026–2027 academic year.

This initiative is framed as the start of a longer-term, community-building effort within the faculty, and has been endorsed for development within the scope of Inclusivision. Anyone interested in joining the organizing team for such an activity, can reach out to inclusion.feb rug.nl

This proposal aims to strengthen support structures for women pursuing academic careers within the FEB, with particular attention to the key transition points in the academic pipeline, being the moments where women are most likely to leave academia. The target audience is female PhD candidates in Economics, though the intention is for the model to further benefit the wider academic pipeline.

The panel sees promise in the idea but felt it needs further shaping before it can run. The plan going forward is to build on the FEB's existing mentorship programmes and explore a pipeline model, where a mentee at the mid-career stage goes on to mentor a PhD-level mentee themselves, creating a chain of support across career stages. This development work is planned for the autumn of 2026, with general FEB staff involved as mentors alongside the PhD initiator.

This idea aims to strengthen interaction and a shared sense of belonging between Dutch and international students within FEB. It targets all FEB students, and the approach is to facilitate and endorse student-led, faculty-supported activities that bring different student groups together.

Concretely, this means working with student associations and committees, such as the EBF, to encourage broader international representation, and increasing the accessibility of FEB/EBF workshops and conferences by using English as the working language.

Alongside the new proposals, the panel also reviewed FEB's existing mentoring programme for women in academia, which currently pairs 9 mid-to-senior career couples. Rather than a new idea, this presents an opportunity to build on something that is known to already be impactful. This could include expanding the programme to a larger audience and further improving the connections between different career stages, so it complements the pipeline model being explored for PhD-level support.