Advancement Ally - Dalyn Montgomery
Director of Alumni Marketing Strategy & Analytics
1. What is your full name and is there a meaning or story behind it?
Dalyn Robert Montgomery. My father's name is David, my mother's name is Lynn, and my name is a contraction pronounced "Day-lun". Robert was my paternal grandfather's name, and my Montgomery ancestors came to colonial America from Scotland/Ireland in the early 1600s.
2. Pronouns:
He/him
3. How do you identify yourself or what is something you would like others to know about you?
I am a straight, white, cis-gendered, American male with all the default settings that entails. Part of that includes a fish-IN-water upbringing where most of my identity has gone unchallenged and unengaged. I did not choose those things, but I have chosen my faith, as a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. My faith was a part of my upbringing and it is at the core of my identity and the center of all my decision making.
4. What is your favorite comfort food?
I have an unexplainable level of satisfaction while eating a simple bean and cheese burrito.
5. What are your favorite cultural or family traditions?
My family observes a "sabbath" day every Sunday where we don't simply go to church, but we also do our best to refrain from work, anything that makes someone else work, commerce, or general entertainment that can easily or regularly done on another day. Instead we find ways to spend time with family and friends doing things that uplift or help others. I love the regular re-set and opportunity to step outside my normal daily routine.
6. What is something people wrongly assume about you? (biases, stereotypes, ethnic identity, etc.)
People assume all the things associated with straight white American men with me, which I don't really resent, as most have at some time or to some extent been true with me, but, I have had a unique set of circumstances and events in my life that have shaken me out from my default setting and challenged or upturned most of my earliest assumptions about life and society.
7. If you could change/create any policy (campus, state or national) what would it be and why?
I would detach school funding from property values and instead construct a financial and social model that gives incentive to SES/demographic mixtures in neighborhoods and schools. Economic and racial isolationism has a causal relationship to inequality in outcomes.
8. If you could have any social justice superpower, what would it be?
To better help any individual's or institutions, effects on others, more visible clear and obvious.
9. What is something you enjoy doing for others?
I like helping other people achieve their own dreams. Because I have a professional training and experience in college admissions, I volunteer helping high school kids get into college.
10. What is something that makes you feel most alive?
Surfing
11. If two (or more) worlds (i.e. music, artists, clothing, movies, eras, genres) could collide/collaborate, what would you choose?
I would love if every local city government had a full (and fully funded) Hollywood production team on retainer to produce productions targeted to solving local injustices or inequities.
12. What is something that should be free but is not?
Health care and education.
13. Which affiliations/clubs/organizations/hobbies have you been involved in?
NAGAP, NADOHE, ASHE.NAACP.
I paint, write articles about the meaning of men's clothing, do academic research about racial dynamics in America, love rugby and football.
14. What makes you feel uncomfortable?
Being late for anything.
15. What is your favorite thing about working at UCR or your favorite UCR memory?
I love being part in the economic and social mobility project that UCR does so well.