Jameelah Jones, KU graduate student, is Student Senate's first director of Diversity and Inclusion.

At the tiny, historically black Southern college where she got her undergraduate degree, Jameelah Jones looked like everyone else.

There was a “level of comfort there and a level of safety,” she said.

Then she came to Kansas University for graduate school. In a sea of 25,000 students — fewer than 5 percent of them black, according to KU data — Jones said she felt different.

Jones now is in a formal position to help make KU more welcoming for students of color and other underrepresented groups, including LGBT students and students with disabilities.

Jameelah Jones, KU graduate student, is Student Senate's first director of Diversity and Inclusion.

Jones started this month as KU Student Senate’s director of Diversity and Inclusion. Student Senate approved creating and funding the part-time executive staff position in December, following student protests about events in Ferguson, Mo., and amid ongoing efforts at the administrative level to increase diversity at KU.

Student Senate has had a multicultural affairs committee and a task force on the status of minority students. It is hoped that Jones will be both a leader and a liaison between students and administration, Student Body President Morgan Said said.

“I think the university is making its best effort on a large scale to address this issue, but unless there are students on the ground … I’m not sure that the university can hit its mark,” Said said. “Student voices are vital at a university.”

Said said Jones’ role is to make “tangible and qualitative policy and procedure changes” within the university to better represent its minority students.

Jones said she would draw on some of her personal experiences to do that.

Originally from Conyers, Ga., Jones has her undergraduate degree in English from Paine College in Augusta, Ga. At KU, she’s a second-year graduate student in African and African-American studies.

Jones said she was passionate about helping people learn and that African-American studies classes and literature opened her eyes to a particular opportunity.

“Some people need to learn about more diverse groups and how to be inclusive,” she said.

Jones said awareness can go a long way toward preventing actions that — even unintentionally — might hurt someone’s feelings.

An example: One day at a campus cafeteria someone came up to Jones, apparently assuming she worked there, and asked her for something. Jones said she thought it was funny, but after hearing from a number of other black friends that the same thing had happened to them, she thought differently.

“It was one of those experiences that made them feel that they don’t belong here,” she said.

Jones herself found “safe spaces” to plug into at KU, which have helped her feel at home, she said.

“When students have experiences outside of academics, it increases their likelihood of staying at the university,” Jones said. “We want students to have positive experiences here.”

She’s been involved with Black Student Union, the Emily Taylor Center for Women and Gender Equity, among other groups, and is the current Miss Black and Gold Scholarship Pageant winner through Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity.

There are lots of clubs for under-represented groups at KU, she said, from the Hispanic American Leadership Organization to Spectrum KU (formerly Queers and Allies) to AbleHawks and Allies.

One of Jones’ ideas is creating a roundtable for leaders of those clubs to stay in touch with their issues and identify trends that policies could address.

“There is power in numbers,” she said.

She also wants to develop cultural competency training to help students better understand and include minorities.

Jones said she hopes to work with KU’s Office of Multicultural Affairs and Office of Diversity and Equity to offer help with their initiatives and keep them abreast of what students are doing.

Blane Harding, Office of Multicultural Affairs director, said he’s already talked to Jones and looks forward to working more with her.

He said the administration needed an informed, go-to student for the issue of diversity on campus.

“Diversity and multiculturalism and social justice are critical components of every college education,” he said, “and for students to create this position I think it really drives that point home.”