Deborah Casey-Powell, Ph.D. 
Vice President of Student Affairs

Over the past five years, Green River Community College has worked hard to promote opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage deeply and genuinely with each other through diverse initiatives and dialogues. Green River affirms diversity as fundamental to our educational goals and have undertaken significant efforts to transform the campus into a more vibrant and inclusive community.

We have done this in various ways from raising campus awareness of our communities of color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, socio-economic status, and national origin; fostering the growth of students of color as young leaders through programming, advising, and facilitation of student-faculty interactions; providing institutional support for students of color both within and outside the structures of established cultural organizations; creating room for different expressions of ethnic identity, not only cultural but also political and intellectual; providing educational programming and resources for the campus on the changing landscape of race relations and multiculturalism at Green River and beyond; offering programming on issues of social justice designed to prepare students to be effective participants in their future communities, and creating a multicultural space where all members of the campus community can interact on multiple levels. We have also sought to recognize our diverse student body and provide students with a depth of understanding of themselves and the world that equips them to become better leaders and citizens.

Helping to transform the campus into a more vibrant and inclusive community is the primary goal of Student Affairs and Retention’s Diversity and Multicultural Affairs office. This is a formidable task since the campus is made up of multiple communities with great degrees of heterogeneity within communities. It commands a multifaceted approach campus-wide to truly reflect our surrounding community. In partnership with Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, the President’s Commission on Diversity, Multicultural Equity Council, and the Instructional Diversity Council this multifaceted approach continues to develop in order to embrace the diversity of the student body and accommodate all the communities with whom we work.

Michael Tuncap, Ph.D.C
Director of Multicultural & Diversity Services

Michael Tuncap was born in the village of Aniguak, Guam & raised in Tacoma, Washington. Michael was the founding Director of the Pacific Islander Student Commission at UW Seattle in 2000 & co-founder of the PIONEER outreach program in 2001. He studied at the University of Virginia in 2000 as a research fellow with the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute. In 2001, he studied at the Goldman School of Public Policy as a research fellow with the Public Policy & International Affairs Institute. Michael graduated from UW Seattle with degrees in Communications & Political Science.

From 2003 to 2009, he taught Ethnic Studies courses to over 1,200 undergraduates at the University of California Berkeley. He received his M.A in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley in 2005 & is currently completing his PH.D. Michael worked as a Lead Counselor for the TRIO SSS program at UW Seattle from 2009-10. From 2010-11, he worked as a coordinator & teacher for the TRIO Upward Bound program at Evergreen State College. He served as Chair of the Guam Delegation to the United Nations from 2008 to 2010.

Michael is Director of the Pacific Islander Studies Institute, a native research group working to implement PI curriculum in K-12 & higher education in the state of Washington. His most recent work is featured in Matamai: The Vasa in Us (2010), an anthology of indigenous writings from the Pacific Northwest.