Step 1: Build a Team and Define a Shared Vision
Build a team and define a shared vision.
The first step is to pull together an interdisciplinary team of college leaders, faculty, and staff with expertise in a range of subjects to ensure that conversations and planning sessions incorporate varied insights and perspectives. Early meetings should focus on clearly defining goals, expectations, and roles and establishing decision-making processes. The team should also use these conversations to agree on a shared vision and objectives, review relevant college goals and activities, and begin exploring programs with the potential to achieve those goals.
Examples From North Carolina
Each of the North Carolina colleges formed a team with a diverse set of stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and presidents, vice presidents, or other college leaders. The teams met monthly to review project progress and iterate ideas, plans, and activities to address early findings and to make adjustments that reflected their colleges’ unique circumstances.
In their initial conversations, the teams selected a few specific programs to focus on in order to better understand both the economic advancement opportunities these programs could open up for students and the barriers that might limit access to the programs for students from certain demographic or socioeconomic populations. The goal was to use what they learned in that exercise to design strategies that would be effective across multiple programs.