2024 Focus Award Recipient - Organization

RIISE

Reinventing the Interface of Inclusivity, Sports, and Engineering, known as RIISE, is a student organization on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus that was founded in 2020.  The mission of RIISE is to showcase Paralympic excellence and improve accessibility in adaptive sports. We recognized RIISE’s efforts in 2021 as an active student organization continually striving to make our community a more inclusive place to live and play. RIISE has built upon its successes with intercollegiate wheelchair basketball and aims to make Wheel Rise an annual Big 10 event. 

This year, though, RIISE is being recognized for its efforts to enhance the world of accessibility throughout campus, extending beyond its primary mission area of athletics to what it termed environmental inclusivity. 

In mid-January, members from RIISE presented to the Office of Institutional Equity an accessibility audit that they had undertaken of buildings on the West Lafayette campus.  It was inspiring to listen to how student leaders within RIISE resumed a project that had been started by earlier members, focused their efforts, and brought the audit to completion with the end goal of ensuring that Purdue’s campus is accessible to all, no matter the disability.  We are excited to partner with RIISE to address concerns raised in their report and have already begun working to that end.