Trinity Community Embraces Newly Defined Campus Values

Trinity College staff and faculty members gathered before the start of the academic year to continue the work of building a culture of belonging and connection on campus.

Trinity’s Division of Students, Community, and Institutional Culture hosted a keynote talk by bestselling author and workplace kindness and civility expert Shola Richards on August 17, 2026. All faculty and staff were invited to bring a guest to the program, which also included a question-and-answer session with Richards, a book-signing with free copies of his book, Civil Unity, and lunch.

While Richards focused his talk on kindness, College leaders took the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate Trinity’s Campus Values. President Dan Lugo said, “Over the past year, we all—as a Trinity community—adopted four campus values: access, belonging, connection, and curiosity and open inquiry. These values weren’t developed in isolation. They emerged through months of conversations and thoughtful engagement, involving hundreds of students, faculty, and staff from across our campus.”

Lugo added, “Values matter most when they shape our decisions, our interactions, and the culture that we create together. Our values influence how we welcome new colleagues and students, how we navigate disagreement with respect… and how we ensure that every member of this community has the opportunity to fully contribute and to thrive here at Trinity.”

Vice President for Students, Community, and Institutional Culture Anita Davis said that the keynote talk and the division retreat held later that day were “focused intentionally on the set of shared values that will guide how people work, learn, and live together at Trinity.”

Davis provides leadership to the Student Life Division, the Office of Community and Belonging, and the Office of Human Resources, bringing together key areas that shape the student experience, support employees, and advance a strong and connected campus culture. “It’s all about interconnectedness,” Davis said. “Alone, we can’t do things as well, or sometimes at all. But together, we are powerful.”

Davis introduced the Trinity audience to Richards, who, in addition to being an author, also is the CEO and founder of Go Together Global and the host of The Kindness Extremist podcast. As a speaker, Richards has shared his message with top universities, Fortune 500 companies, national media, and even through testimony to the U.S. Congress. “Most of all, Shola is leading a worldwide movement to change the world based on how we treat each other at work,” Davis said.

Richards began by connecting the concept of kindness to Trinity’s Campus Values. “You’re building a foundation based on what matters, and this foundation can only happen with kindness,” he said. “Kindness flows through all four of the values.”

Kindness, in his definition, is demonstrated by actions showing that “we sincerely care about another living creature, even when it’s difficult, inconvenient, or costs us something.” But the words “kind” and “nice” cannot be used interchangeably, he added: “Nice is something that you do; kind is something that you are.”

Richards listed three basic reasons why he believes people aren’t kinder to each other: “One, I’m too overwhelmed, too burnt out, and too exhausted to think about kindness. Two, I’m only one person; what meaningful change can I make? The world’s a dumpster fire. Or three, I’m not willing to risk my relationships, my career, or my safety to take a stand against unkindness.”

To counter those challenges, he offered the mantras, “Start within. Just today. Go first.”

“Start within” refers to prioritizing one’s own mental health. “Self-kindness is so much deeper than self-care. Self-kindness is doing the hard stuff that’s going to make you better for the future ahead,” he said. “You can’t give kindness to others if you don’t start with yourself.”

“Just today,” he said, means committing to daily, consistent, kind actions done over and over again, taken one small step at a time. “Everyone wants to change the world, but no one wants to unload the dishwasher,” Richards said. “I’ll tell you that the number-one test of someone being a kind person, to me, is your willingness to return the shopping cart when you’re done grocery shopping.”

“Go first” means facing challenges head-on. “There are challenges—those conversations that you know that you need to have,” Richards said. “The quality of our lives is in direct proportion to the amount of difficult conversations that we’re willing to have. That’s the work.”

Richards told the Trinity community, “My challenge for you, in this season, is that you continue to show up and do everything that you can to create the kind of world that we all need.”

Lugo noted that Richards’ program came at the right time, with students about to return to campus for a new academic year. “His message reminds us that healthy institutions are not built only through strategy and policy, but through the everyday choices we make and how we treat one another,” Lugo said.

Read more about Trinity’s Campus Values here.