Who We Are
- Motto: The World Around Our Table
- Goal: Bringing people together to make the world better
- Tagline: UBC’s International Academic Community
SJC’s mission will focus on creating a more productive international academic community at UBC, more impactful interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange, and a stronger sense of belonging through supportive social relationships that enhance the well-being of UBC students, staff, and faculty. Through the core activity of creating intellectual and cultural exchange through conversations over shared meals, SJC fellowship as a practice embodies our motto of “The World Around Our Table,” both in defining who we are as an international academic community, and by naming the primary means by which community-building is achieved.
SJC Fellowship
“SJC Fellows” are defined as graduate students, staff, faculty, alumni, honourary community members—and in the future academically advanced undergraduate students who plan to pursue graduate studies—who actively and consistently participate in achieving SJC’s goal of “Bringing people together to make the world better.” St. John’s College is shifting from a residential membership model to a distributed fellowship model anchored in program participation. During the first 29 years of our existence, living in the St. John’s College quadrangle equated to being an SJC Fellow.
SJC’s exciting next phase of growth and expansion will take place within the new graduate student-focused Lower Mall Precinct (LMP) arising between 2026-2030 from the ashes of the original SJC quadrangle. Although many of the graduate students living in LMP will be SJC residential Fellows, our community-building programming and SJC fellowship will extend both to the 1530+ residents who live in the LMP complex as well as beyond the LMP residents.
Who Does SJC Serve?
St. John’s College’s (SJC) mission is to create a strong international academic community at UBC through programs that serve graduate students, staff, faculty, and alumni. Through offering welcoming and inclusive intellectual and cultural exchange over shared meals, our programming builds relationships of trust that are mutually supportive and a foundation for a strong sense of belonging—a core element for maintaining well-being and productivity within the highly stressful lives of the graduate students upon whom UBC’s research and teaching mission rely.
Whether through community-building programs such as “Hot Lunch” for UBC Staff–repeatedly cited since its creation in 2014 as one of the reasons that UBC is considered one of British Columbia’s top places to work–or through the stimulating conversations over a meal that take place during our dinner series that have been named in honour of SJC’s founding Principal Dr. Grant Ingram, our long-time Faculty Fellow Elder Larry Grant, or our Johannean Founder Dr. George Shen, our goal is to support mutual learning through dialogues about challenging–and sometimes difficult–topics.
Hard yet necessary conversations about difficult problems and divisive issues are moderated by mutual respect and relationships of reciprocity–a shared trust developed through metaphorically ‘breaking bread together’–something which in our international academic community over the last 28 years has often meant in practice sharing meals over rice rather than bread. SJC has embodied a sociality where sharing food together at the same table creates an ethic of respecting each other’s cuisines and cultures, bringing people together to experience our differences in culinary tastes even as we agree to disagree over our intellectual divergence.