Creating an Equitable Leadership for Change

When HHMI created Learning Community Clusters, they proposed an entirely new grant design for the Inclusive Excellence 3 award. We were disparate institutions who were once competitors and now expected to work cooperatively with little direction. Our only commonality was the challenge question from our initial proposals. In coming together, we were expected to produce a coherent proposal that could be implemented across institutions regardless of difference. Over the course of organizing meetings, we began putting together a proposal to be enacted across our fourteen institutions in the form best suited to the individual college or university's existing culture. Since the overall goal was institutional transformation around mindset, the proposal was crafted to allow each institution significant leeway in the implementation. However, to maintain the cohesiveness of our LCC and ensure that our framing question remained at the forefront of all work, we need to create a leadership structure to guide the work.

This presentation focuses on the process of creating a leadership structure for change that spans multiple institutional needs. We emphasize a series of critical questions that are used for creating this Change leadership structure to ensure that equity is maintained in the form of 1. Being mindful not to place undue burden on faculty/administrators of color to lead change; 2. Being mindful to acknowledge and de-center whiteness as structuring academic institutions; 3. Being mindful to create professional development opportunities within the leadership structure to all for individual growth. While developing an implementation plan for the actual work of the IE3 required cooperation across institutions, sustaining the work has presented a different set of challenges. This presentation is designed to provide strategies for creating effective change leadership that addresses current challenges and is capable of pivoting to address future challenges as they arise.