 Thank you very much for coming. I would first like to thank Brian, who is taking the leadership role on trying to pull us all together to come up with a spectacular strategic action plan. And from what you'll hear today, I think we're at a good path. And Brian has lost his voice, which is not a bad thing since I want to hear from the rest of you today. And so we're going to do a lot of the talking in place of Brian. And first, I would like to thank all the phase one participants. The phase one was to have to take a look at the goals that many of you were here and developed a few years back, reassess them, refine them, make it more specific, and introduce measurables and connect them with the other goals. And we had six groups that worked very hard, and I would like to ask the participants of the six groups to please stand up so we all see who you are. And thank you so much for your great work. Thank you. Thank you. Also, I would like to thank everybody for coming and also our friends from the University College that are remotely connected with us. Is that a fact? Are we on? Good, we're on. So we have the UC University College folks that participating virtually in this effort to add depth and shape our specific goals. So we're at a great start. Please keep in mind that the main reason we're here is to make this place better for the students. It's all about the students, and we should always keep this in mind. And this is the first step, and I'll explain at the end sort of the future steps. And I'll ask Cynthia now to come up and tell us about the logistics. Good afternoon. I know a lot of you. I'm Cynthia Steinberg. Dean of Shea, but my only role today is to make sure that we move through and do things on time. And my job will be simply to say, do this now, stop, do this now, next group. And so let me just briefly go over how this was planned. You'll see on your tables, everyone has a big stack of worksheets. And so there'll be a presentation of about 10 minutes. Then we're going to ask you to write your thoughts quietly for like two minutes, sort of like a free write exercise on the sheets. You might also be jotting down notes as the speaker is speaking. Make sure when you take a sheet that you circle which goal it is that you're talking about because they're blank in that sense. And just to note that this is not your only opportunity, nor if people aren't here, you should be sure to let them know that there's also a tinyyearold.com. You have it there at your table. I'm sure it will go out electronically for additional feedback that you may want to make after today's session. So a 10 minute session, you'll be jotting things down, you'll have about two minutes to have a quiet reflection on what you heard. Then we're asking you to have about six to eight minutes of table discussion and dialogue. And then I'll be calling up the next person for the next presentation. So it's going to be fast and energetic and it's going to be great. We're going to do that pattern again through all the six goal statements. And I think unless there's anything else I need to say, we're going to begin with the group from goal number one, problems that matter, and each group will introduce themselves to you. Hi, I'm Sarah Ruchet. I work in the Office of Advancement and I am joined by Becky Spritz, who is the chair of this visioning group, the associate dean of the School of Social and Natural Sciences and Brian Hendrickson, who's an associate professor of writing. And so we were tasked with looking at the first goal of working with local and global communities to address problems that matter most to society. So I'm going to start with breaking down how we approach this, but first a big thanks to our team. We all work together closely on this and our key findings where we'll start with needing to align Roger Williams with what the world needs now. I think it's we've got Brian as our, Brian Williams as our historian of strategic planning that looking for what the world needs now has been around in our language since the 90s and, but there haven't been many efforts to define exactly what the world needs. And we all within our own departments and efforts have our own way of approaching this. But we as a group decided to do an external scan of the world's problems by looking at economic data, global development goals, and then looking at our internal centers of excellence and effort where we're trying to address where we are tackling what the world needs now. And I'm delighted to report that the Venn diagram was mostly a circle, though there has not been a strategic umbrella. And so we are trying to lay that out today. Something that we want to continue talking about and get some feedback from the community is this idea of, well, our community here working with local and global communities and defining the depth and quality of that because working with local and global communities does not necessarily mean impacting, collaborating, getting iterative feedback. And so we'd like to structure exactly what we mean when we say working with these communities. And also often the language around this has been based around looking at what Bristol needs and then what Providence needs, what Rhode Island needs, what the world needs in these concentric circles. But when we were looking at the external and internal problems that were being addressed, there was often really the same list, whether it's economic development, justice. And so we decided that our approach needs to pivot from being place-based to problem-based in being the university the world needs now. So again in talking about sort of the conceptual sort of aspects of this, we realized we were looking at a goal that really has two parts. On the one hand, you can talk about working with local and global communities as its own goal with its own framework for assessment. We also have this other part of this goal which is addressing the problems that matter most of society and you can imagine that also being separate. I don't think that we necessarily want to treat those separately. I think what we realize that if what we are really doing is working with those local and global communities in a meaningful way, we're also working with them to identify and address those problems. So as we ask sort of which problems that matter most, I think one of the things we need to figure out is a framework for how we're going to further identify those in partnership with the partners that we're deciding to sort of really connect with in a meaningful way. So when we have this idea of sort of how we're going to go about doing that, part of that is is figuring out what does that mean then to sort of effectively collaborate with our partners. What does it mean to really develop strategies for doing that in a sustained way and in a reciprocal way? And then ultimately though we do have to own our own values. What are those that are going to really determine which of those partnerships we cultivate? And I think Becky's going to talk a little bit more about sort of how we've begun that conversation though it's going to be one that we're going to be probably continuing in perpetuity. And I think right now we're sort of framing those around at least some of these concepts like peace justice and resilience that arose out of the research we've been doing which Becky will talk about. Thanks Ryan. So we're going forward. What are our next steps as we begin to think about moving into phase two of our strategic action planning. For our goal in particular it will be important for us to identify our institutional priorities. We have to continue asking this question what does the world need because although we've started some of the conversations around what we care about as a community we have yet to to calibrate that with our existing community partners. And we need to find out are we as an institution really aligning with what our communities say that they need. But we also want to continue again as part of phase two within our academic program as well as our co-curricular programming will be really asking the question where do we have existing areas of strength and resources and expertise. And we're really excited to be able to look across those to break down those silos as they say but to establish centers of excellence and expertise around some of these important problems that matter. We look forward to identifying with that information and aligning that together creating a set of priorities that are based upon the voices of the community both our community and the others and making sure we have a plan that makes these goals measurable that we can assess them both for ourselves and how effectively we're doing with helping teach our students about how to solve the world's problems or how to address the world problems or how to work collaboratively to address those problems. And then we have to recalibrate right so every so often we have to make sure our institution is still aligned with what the world needs because we know how quickly and rapidly those things are changing. When we started our process as a working group we were a little overwhelmed with this prospect of how do we begin to identify what our priorities are as an institution. And it occurred to us that that would be a good place to start the conversation and so many of you participated in the survey and thank you. In December we distributed the survey via email just asking folks in the community to talk about what problems they believe that we are facing. And we did this just really to identify what are the things we care about what are the things that our students our faculty our staff the board of trustees the cabinet members what are the things that we care about the most. And what we hope to use this data for is as a starting point then not as the answer this is our set of priorities that these are the things that we're going to do but as a starting point if we're saying these are the things that we care about now let's look internally where do we have areas of expertise on that and hey communities are these the things that you care about too. So as we think about wrapping up our words to you what we're excited about is that this is only the start of the conversation and we wanted to end with a notion that this is a huge opportunity for us. The opportunity to create a shared identity as an institution of working on problems that matter is something that's been discussed for a long time in terms of thinking about how we resituate the university. What the university what is the value of the university to society. These are conversations that are happening a great deal right now in higher education because there's a lot of mistrust about colleges and universities. There are a lot of questions about what really what's the value of an institution and by creating a public good identity by reconsidering the university we have an opportunity at Roger Williams to be a leader in higher education around these concepts and these conversations. We also see it as a huge opportunity in in terms of our partnership with communities. One of the things that that some universities are doing and at the AAC the American Association of College and Universities conference that I attended last week there are lots of examples of this and and where it's happening where universities identify themselves as anchor institutions. These are institutions that make a commitment to the communities that they're working with that that we are in this with them that we are working collaboratively on these important problems that matter and that we are going to commit our privilege and our resources and what we have to offer as a university to helping to address some of these most important and pressing problems. So we return to something that Sarah mentioned earlier about this pivot from place to problem that it's really a chance for us to think about again prioritizing not not where we are and whether we're working locally or globally but really who we are and that there's a there's a moral imperative for us to do that. So we look forward to your thoughts and feedback about this and it's a continuing the conversation. Thank you fabulous thanks so much so now you have two minutes to just jot down your own thoughts think about the the questions on the paper and have some quiet time and then i'll let you know when the table conversations should begin. All right you're going to want to start wrapping up that conversation get those last few words out. As you're wrapping up make sure you circle which goal you just commented on and anything else you want to add to your comments based on the conversation. Get yourselves ready for a new with a new sheet. We will turn now to goal number two transformational educational experiences. Hi everybody um I'm Jason Jacobs and I was the chair of this committee and I'm going to talk only a tiny bit in order to then hand things over to my colleague Laura Diemore who will say much more but I wanted to just frame a little bit the work that we did in our committee by starting by acknowledging that at the beginning of our meetings I think part of what we wondered is well what what room is there really to question this goal given that the university has been kind of all in on experiential education for some time now we've just welcomed a new associate provost for community engagement etc etc like you know if we decided that we weren't going to back experiential and engaged and community engaged learning it was a little late in the game for that but we actually found that we had a lot to say and again I'll let Laura go through the details of that by looking at the phrase that you see up there on the screen in front of you as actually consisting of three significant parts we were talking about transformative educational experiences meaning those kinds of pedagogies and learning experiences and opportunities that are new and innovative and addressed to the kinds of problems that the previous group which is articulating so that would be one thing the second thing for all students right in the service of letting all students to fulfill their potential I think we took very seriously in the white paper that we composed the notion that everything we're doing here should be inseparable from our diversity and inclusion efforts and that we wanted to work from what I consider to be the not only the practical but the moral position that the students who are worthy of these kinds of transformative educational experiences are students all students right and that what we really wanted to do was to think about how the transformative effects of these educational experiences would help students fulfill their potential as learners professionals and citizens which means you know expanding the scope way out from the individual payoff of higher ed in terms of career opportunities and income for individual students and thinking and again following directly on the previous group how in as ambitiously as we can possibly conceive it how these experiences help students do things that matter for their whole lives and for the whole world and with that I will hand things over to Laura indeed so one of the coolest things about working on this particular committee is that this goal of providing transformative educational experiences in preparing all students to fulfill their potential as lifelong learners professionals and citizens touches on every other aspect of RWU's commitment to be the university that the world needs now so as Jason just described the goal not only indicates a particular approach to educational activities I'm ahead of myself I'll go back to that slide not only an approach to educational activities in pedagogy but it's also a commitment to prepare all students to fulfill their lifelong potential and it's also thinking about a transformative education about not only career success but also about helping students become reflective learners and citizens how do you go back so let me just say who our team was I'm sorry about that so our team was Sean Collin myself Laura Deymour, Casey Ferrara, Daryl Ford, Suzanne Harrington Steppen, Abbas Hill, Jason Jacobs, Takara Roderick and Carol Siketty which was a lovely mix of folks from all over the university from different colleges and different divisions thank you for your work so also going off of what the last committee talked about as we become sort of under more increasing scrutiny in terms of cost and benefit and return on investment it's crucial for institutions like RWU to articulate a clear vision of what the value of a college education is and that emphasis has to be beyond career skills development and job placement and into transformative educational experiences that include things like academic rigor critical thinking collaboration and community engagement that make that positions RWU to ensure that our graduates are able to participate successfully in contemporary life to understand and critique and also to work to improve the forces that are shaping that life for their own benefit as well as for the benefit of the world it is widely recognized among experts and employers that the development of critical thinking skills is actually an irreplaceable contribution of the liberal arts and so RWU's emphasis on the complementarity of liberal arts and professional learning and the central place of the interdisciplinary core curriculum in every student's experience ensures that RWU students graduate prepared with skills that go beyond job training let's see yeah we can go ahead so by committing to transformative educational experiences that are designed to prepare all students to fulfill their potential RWU will position itself to recruit and enable the work of students whose full potential has been and this is really important here too for unexplored so students whose most impressive academic achievements still lie ahead of them since engaged experiential collaborative and community engaged learning particularly benefits underrepresented students and students with particularly learned particular learning needs and challenges RWU is uniquely positioned to move from being an institution among the very many of its kind competing for the diminishing number of traditional college students to meet its enrollment goals to become instead an institution that is rising to meet the needs of the vast number of non-traditional students whose educational needs are crucial to our shared futures the goal can particularly be understood as a fusion of our commitment to engage in experiential learning which includes student leadership opportunities and community engagement and our commitment commitment to diversity and inclusion so RWU currently enrolls students with a wide range of yeah I think we can go forward prior preparation and academic ability the virtue of this reality is that allows us as an institution to focus on and invest in students potential delivering transformative educational experiences that create meaningful learning regardless of students starting point or prior more of motivation it's important that this goal be measurable and it's measurable on both sides of both educational experience and the fulfilling potential of all students through things like the university's regular demonstration of let's see academic rigor and critical thinking in regular self-studies and external reviews in the provost's office in institutional research in our Carnegie classification application yes can i go back two more again we didn't change our wording for this particular goal we talked a lot about whether or not we thought that the wording of the current goal was what we wanted to portray for all of these different reasons and we did stick with it we recognize that transformative is very bold and it's hard sometimes to measure but we think that we do have the things either in place or able to easily be put in place in order to measure them ultimately in order to create mechanisms for students to engage in formalized goal setting we'll be able to measure the degree to which an RWU education enables students to achieve that success as they define it for themselves thank you all right so now you have two minutes to do some quiet reflection think about the forms the questions and make sure you circle which goal you're commenting on all right and you want to start to wrap up that conversation make sure you've indicated which goal you were just talking about on your forms and so now we will transition to goal number three shorthand all ages and stages oh we have a remote can we actually use it oh perfect uh good afternoon my name is marcus sandscomb i'm the director of graduate admission here at roger Williams and this is lisa landerman our director or dean rather of student life and we're here on behalf of the goal for all ages and stages which you see on the screen here and before we move along i wanted to point out just a couple of words that you think about as we go forward and that's the words of dedicated and aspiring and that'll help make more sense when we get a little bit further on our rationale because we actually did change our goal statement i want to thank all of our committee members you see it's a very interdisciplinary group i had the pleasure of co-chairing alongside jena bianco from university college we also had amy solentano from undergraduate admission catherine forza from the writing department megan hanson from alumni lisa if you've already met uh elizabeth neemire from c s zoila cuzada from diversity equity inclusion and autumn cuzada grant from our history department i want to thank them all we had a fantastic group i don't know about anybody view but group work is usually pretty painful this was a fantastic group and i'm thankful for everybody actually pitching in which was nice to work in a group that does that so a few key findings for our work and you know that there's people here that we're representing grad non-traditional so i'm glad we had an opportunity to influence some of this discussion but our strategy to this point has largely focused on the full-time undergraduate that's obviously not unique to roger william's small private institutions have to really focus on the bread and butter and what brings in the dollars so that's been the focus here but there are some perils of that and you'll see that we've gone into detail in that in the white paper we are still lacking and this is my personal investment in this we're lacking investment and vision for graduate studies so it's something we need to think about more deliberately going forward we have been particularly reliant on the undergraduate students but as you've probably seen in a lot of the research and a lot of the news there's a lot of investment that needs to happen for adult learners across a variety of different spaces and we'll talk more about them issues of access remain a critical problem for us and access is everything from affordability to physical access of the campus technology infrastructure and so on so we have a lot of work to do there and thankfully we've got some infrastructures that have already started making significant progress there but we have work to do and part of this work those of you that weren't part of this initial stage in a group we were given a list of 400 tasks from previous strategic plans and we called them down to lists of tasks that related to our goal and through that work we found that even though there are about 50 of those goals that related specific or tasks that related specifically to us many of the tasks are no longer relevant so even just in the last 10 years things have changed so rapidly that we've had opportunities to really infuse this work and make some new tasks and goals that came out of this work if you watch the news you've probably seen various headlines like what you see on the screen it's very confusing for anybody who's watching higher ed it's like eating eggs it's either good today or it's bad today so we can't seem to figure that out but the reality is employers desperately want academic credentials and if you look into the census data over half of us adults 18 to 64 have no credential whatsoever that's a huge opportunity and whether people question the value in the ROI of getting a higher education degree of any kind the reality is employers are not running away from needing some sort of academic credential and in fact if you look over the next 10 years the reality is employers the actual the growth in jobs that require master's degrees or doctoral degrees are actually the highest growth of any job categories for those that need educational attainment so it's a significant opportunity and a moral imperative that we have to support those of really all ages and stages and multi-generational learners which brings us to the change in our goal statement when we thought about aspiring and dedicated it's like are we really going to take out exactly who those people are and is it really that critical to really subdivide who's going to be part of our community or should we really be supporting all learners so we really focused on all learners as the first group talked about as well and we really focused on the diversity of those learners and what their learning experiences are like and differences that Lisa will talk to you about and this being a multi-generational community so I'm going to pass it over Lisa to have her tell you a little bit more about that work. Thank you so what we decided as a rationale for changing this goal Mark has already alluded to much of it but that we really need to embrace this idea of diversity and so diversity and so many levels and as we've talked about our equity our diversity equity inclusion plan we believe that that needs to be infused in this I think all of us probably you know our groups probably talked about that but we wanted a goal that actually explicitly stated it we feel like if we're talking about learners that that needed to be explicit and that was one of those changes we also wanted to talk about the needs so in our appendix of our document we define needs as yes the intellectual needs but that part of the liberal arts that is our foundation is about thinking about the holistic development of the student and the whole student and so thinking about needs from and that connects again to access which was one of our key findings and so we really tried to unpack each one of these words in our goal that we really need to embrace learners are not just degree granting students but they might be students who want to go for professional development that might need a micro degree that might need some on-the-job training so that we need to expand our thinking about who our learners is not at the expense of the traditional undergraduate students that we serve and that has been a foundation of our work but that we need to broaden and think more broadly about who our learners are because not just about the marketplace but also that will better serve our local community our Providence community our Rhode Island community and what the world needs now so the the new wording again I think I just said all that on both of those so going forward what does this mean that we need to sort of assess what does that mean we can't be all things to all people but we certainly need to broaden so that we need to sort of assess the current market and the needs partner with employers partner with our community to better understand what might be those broadening I think it really connects to the first goal about might be about addressing some of those social social problems that need to be addressed that we need to expand the resources that we can provide so that this broadened range of learners can be successful that we don't just serve traditionally age undergraduate students we serve graduate students we serve again adult students we serve parents we serve younger adults so that we need to understand that it is a multi-generational community that we need to be welcoming that we need to think about with that diversity of learners comes diversity of delivery of education that the infrastructure for technology to provide innovative transformative curriculum we don't have the infrastructure to support it as well as we we could and we need to be thinking differently about what we provide that we need to effectively work with employers I think again the case has been already made that what we have to offer around a liberal arts base is relevant and needed but it's also a partnering with employers about what does that look like partnering with community agencies what might that look like that we could provide and think about that our mission is outreach our mission is to serve the community and that's as much part of what we need to deliver in our curriculum as it is serving our students that we need to again provide career-ready skills we need to assess the demands for those credentials I said that again we are serving currently graduate students and if the goal is to expand that we couldn't expand much more without better infrastructure to support them the the demands that they have the needs they have to be successful on campus there isn't really the support structure to provide that if we're not going to expand graduate education that would be different but based on what we're learning from the little research that we did that that's certainly a growing market that we need to define our role with pre pre k through 12 opportunities some work is already being done in the uc and I think what became clear in our work together was that many of us who work on the Bristol campus really aren't fully aware of the programs and opportunities that exist in the uc and for us to really be connected to what happens as one rw u we should be aware of of those opportunities and how can we support work together and that we need to expand what we do for the community at large so that might be workshops lectures again helping solve problems and projects that that is part of our mission that needs to be better actualized and I'm actually going to quote Lisa for a second I ever since she said it in task force meeting I've been thinking this but we need to start saying no to good ideas I thought it was a really good thinking because we can't be everything to everybody and I think institutionally we know what kind of constraints we have so being able to make the right decisions on the right opportunities are really critical so we wanted to end here and say as we went through these 400 plus tasks there were a lot of things that we've have accomplished since those goals went in place and some of them by accident but I wanted to tell you about a few of those so and when we think again of multi-generational community of learners we're not doing this in kind of ingest with the undergraduates the full-time undergraduates are very much a part of this work so we have you know we created the CES office we've improved access especially in the diversity areas we've expanded enrollment recruitment strategies beyond our region and been very strategic about how we've done that there was a deliberate separation of accessibility and tutoring services so we've done a lot to really benefit our full-time undergraduates and make that a much more rich experience for them at university college you know we've created that new structure and it's really testament to the staff up there they've done a wonderful job of expanding across the state and serving these non-traditional learners and there's as Lisa mentioned a lot of things that we all don't know that's happening up there there's a lot of fantastic things happening they were really strong academic governance they have a part a committee as part of the board of trustees which is important and they've instituted some really good quality assessment pieces to their work across graduate studies again I had there were some things we came across by accident we created a graduate advisory council of our program directors and some ad hoc folks around campus as well as our graduate student association we created those not knowing they were part of the 2020 plan that was formed you know 13 or so years ago so we're glad we were able to check those off but we didn't know they were in there and then the school of law has added some continuing legal education opportunities and experiential learning and they're actively looking at new opportunities for revenue and programs currently so we're really excited that not only is there much work to do there's been much work that's already been completed and done very successfully and we're excited what the next steps look like so thank you very much hey you probably already know what you're supposed to be doing for the next two minutes quiet reflection and working on your forms right and you're starting to wrap up that conversation you're making sure you've circled the right goal on the sheet that you filled out we are going to transition and now we're going to hear from goal number four affordability so here is our current goal that we were handed teaser we're changing it team is listed on the screen and i want to echo marcus's sentiment that we truly enjoyed working with the team and alice and i in particular found this to be somewhat easy because we had such a great team and it also just like to mention it's one of the unique opportunities i've had here and i can speak on behalf of both of us where we got to work with people in different departments in different areas that we don't always work get to work with and the things they brought and the lenses they brought and the views they brought really gave us a different per view of the university and especially when speaking about something like affordability it was key to the work that we did so we are grateful for this opportunity so at first the topic of affordability was daunting right how do you figure out how to make things affordable higher education has been struggling this for a long time but through our discussions and the lenses and the perspectives that were brought from across campus we focused on these key findings that really helped us develop where we wanted that goal statement to go and the first thing that we acknowledged was affordability is interconnected with all of the other goals that we were working with and really needs to have a strong connection to our institutional commitment to diversity and inclusion work in order to be able to move forward in this area we also recognized that we've had a commitment to affordability and that's looked different over the years but we really want to see that we want a campus-wide commitment to this concept that's clearly stated so that everyone understands what it means and we begin to create a culture of ensuring that affordability we can't work on that unless we all get behind what that idea is and start to promote it for us affordability goes beyond tuition and so when you see our new goal statement i think this will really hit home we wanted it to be more about ensuring the student could just afford their tuition we wanted to focus on they should be able to afford their tuition and be able to have all of the experiences that an institution like us offers all elements of the rw educational experience and in order to do that we know we must be willing and able to change some of our traditional models of serving all ages and stages of students in order to address today's learners needs and that in order to do that the work needs to happen across campus breaking down the silos that still exist and working across all of our departments so here's our new proposed wording affordability to now be defined as being financially accessible to all who aspire to a roger williams university educational experience the difference between those two statements the first one really focusing on just admitted students and we really recognized in the concepts that we started discussing that in order to be affordable you have to start way before they're admitted and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on i'm just going to keep going so our rationale behind the new wording is really focusing again on that word experience so all of the things that we've been hearing today that make us unique as an institution our engaged learning our experiential education the engagement that we see of our students on campus and clubs and organization and internships we want them to be able to do that regardless of their own financial capacity and their life situation so again going beyond tuition to make sure can students study abroad can they afford to do that internship because it means they're giving up a full-time position can they be involved on campus and we recognize that when we go back to our mission it centers on the evolving needs of our students and preparing them to be engaged citizens and members of our global community and so in order to do that we have a responsibility to adapt and recognize and acknowledging that the ever-changing demographics that we've been hearing about today the workforce demands and what employers are asking of us and society is asking for us requires change and that previous definition that we had was just too narrow and focused only on those admitted students and we felt we had to be bolder so going forward some of the things that we want to focus on is educating the campus community on issues related to affordability starting a longer larger conversation to promote recognition of students needs when we were sitting at the table with our committee discussing this idea of beyond tuition and the whole experience we really started to find out new things that none of us knew the cost of textbooks the cost of internships the cost and by cost it's outside of just a physical cost associated with it like Allison said what does students need to give up to do this especially when we talk about all stages and ages so no matter where the learner is no matter where they are in their educational process what what is the cost past a dollar amount what is the cost associated with the experience and so that conversation really needs to continue to happen and needs to happen across campus by all bodies as part of all conversations during every meeting the question has to be asked what is the cost to the students outside of just a dollar amount associated with a tuition or a direct expense we have to articulate and promote clear statement of institutional commitment to affordability again in every conversation in every meeting this needs to be a part of that conversation it needs to be a part of that thought process create clear and fluid pathways for students to move between our campuses schools and programs we're addressing the needs of the students and thinking about their educational experience and talking about how this is accessible and affordable for all we need to be thinking about all pathways for all learners and what is that experience look like and should that experience be limited because of cost direct and otherwise it also caused us to think about how do we assess our current curriculum to expand those opportunities and you've heard earlier some ideas for that but some of the things that we spent some time discussing is how do we help students condense the time to their degree so we have students who come in wanting to accelerate they can't spend a traditional four years do we have options for them how easy is it for students to transfer in so the students who might be finishing up an associate's degree and want to come in or a student who just wants to change in college how are we promoting graduate education so some of the work that's been really terrific around the four plus one programs allows the students to get both of those degrees in a shorter period of time and we offering a variety of different degrees and certificates and things that will make those students markable and get what they want out of their education we need to tie our work with affordability around our student success goals and initiatives so tying the work together so that we're understanding what the needs of our students are so it helping them meet their definition of success and as Amanda mentioned just a moment ago are we asking the questions are the programs inherently too expensive for some in limit participation and i don't know that that's often a conversation that is coming up in some of our meetings so we need to be thinking about can everybody have access to particular programs and we recognized a lot of great work is coming on campus so part of our desire to share with you some of those things in educating around these issues is there's been fantastic new strategies in financial aid packaging that have made a difference in this area the work in university college around pathways and stackable certifications is one that's exciting student life has been working to create an emergency fund where students can go when unexpected life circumstances come up they have a place to go and say i need assistance with this so that they don't have to interrupt their education food pantries both on the bristol campus and province food recovery network and assistance with textbooks and materials that is one of the areas that we see an increasing amount of students coming to us that's making it hard for them to really learn if you don't have the textbook it's hard to be successful in that class and the creation of well-being financial well-being website so how are we educating students so they understand what all the costs are and they understand what their financial aid packages mean and what the loans they're taking out mean for them i mentioned the textbooks and we under lindsay gums leadership have a wonderful initiative under open educational resources to get away from being so reliant on those traditional textbooks so there's an opportunity for faculty to create their own materials for the class that therefore passing on less of an expense to their students and there's some great work in there and alternative funding for experiential learning great example is in study abroad students can use their financial aid package here to study abroad we've added first gen and affordability sessions in recruitment events in a new student and family orientation and last but certainly not least university's college workforce development program is another source of centers of excellence so future things that we want to consider while these things are all important for the financial sustainability of our institution if we want to be transformative like we've been talking about today we need to have an emphasis on affordability to build the university of the world needs now and because we're interconnected as you've heard with other groups our group felt particularly strongly that it's critical for the strategic planning process to be tied to the equity action plan and we look forward to hearing more about that in february that's it for us thank you okay two minutes okay starting to wrap up your conversation making sure you've circled the right goal on the top of the paper so nobody gets confused and getting ready to transition to our next group the penultimate group goal five diversity equity and inclusion hi everyone so we have diversity equity and inclusion just diversity to start with so our original goal was by hiring faculty and staff and recruiting students who mirror the diversity of our region we found that statement very problematic and we'll talk a little bit about why later but for now here is our lovely team so we have Karen Bellotti who is here with me and we'll be speaking with you just a few moments in just a few moments myself Kiki Jacobs from athletics Lorraine Lally from the school of law Tom McDonough from human resources Adam Moore he's a professor in elementary education and Charles Tangarach from engineering so getting to our key findings which are pretty wrapped up with some of the issues that we had with the original statement visual representation is pretty important and I think for when we were actually looking at the goal we think this is really what it was the original goal was trying to get to right so by hiring faculty staff and staff and recruiting students who mirror right so who look like we're thinking about the kind of community that we wanted to create but we felt it in looking at the literature and in looking at some of the research and the things that we're finding on our own campus it was important to call out the importance of representation not just of people but of structures and spaces so what does our campus actually look like right I think a lot of times when people talk about diversity they are using their eyes and though we may have a lot of spaces and different categories of people that we want represented in our community ultimately if folks are walking around and it looks homogeneous that tends to be the thing that they take away so the other thing is that we found that's important is a long-term view right so we're not necessarily interested in tactics that are there for a moment in time unless of course it's determined that you know this is something that is needed for a moment in time right so if we're going to start something it should be something that's sustainable over the long term not just financially but operationally and I think sometimes it's easy to look at the finances and say you know do we have enough money to put into it but ultimately they're going to be departments that are going to have to put these things into action and so we want to make sure that or we want to make sure that departments are thinking about how they're going to be able to continue to commit to the operation the operationalizing of the goals and the things that they're going to be putting into practice the other thing that we found is that you know the goal it can't just be about recruitment because then people are here and there's a community and they can choose to leave the community they can choose to speak ill of the community after they leave so and we're interested in being the kind of place where people are growing so it's about keeping the people first of all but also about thriving that's one of the things that really came about right so we don't just want whether students students or faculty or staff just kind of sticking through inviting their time and just waiting for the end belonging is also one of the things that really came up so what are people feeling like when they're here do they feel like they're part of a community reducing harm what are the things that are taking place whether it's in our classrooms or in offices or in spaces that are really impacting our folks from minoritized backgrounds or marginalized backgrounds what are the things that we're saying that are doing that need to stop so that folks aren't being harmed and so that they can feel like they belong and all of this really gets to culture which is something that the original goal didn't address it's not just about having people here but it's about creating a community and having a culture that allows this to be a diverse place and so all of that gets to you know the need for the work of diversity equity and inclusion the needs for it to be centered in all of the departments I think right now we know that there's the intercultural center and we have started to do some good things or we've hired our first CDO and our vice president for diversity equity and inclusion and we have these programs but right now it is very much programs and people who do a thing over there in some cases and so the interest is in having everybody thinking about it so that it can really be that we can build a community right this community and culture doesn't get changed if it's a few people doing that thing over there so those are the things that we found that were really important and as folks have been the other groups have been speaking they you know they reference the demographics chains changes that are coming they are actually here right the demographic changes the shifts have already happened so the preliminary data that the the census folks released in the think in June showed that I think about if you look at the population just just about 60 percent of the U.S. right now is made up of non-Hispanic white folks and if you look at folks under the age of 15 that is not the case right less than 50 percent there are more we talked about first gen students we talked about folks with different abilities so there are all these folks that are coming into the population that are already here and in fact they have options so whether we choose to address these issues or not will determine not just our stability as a university but our future one of the exciting things exciting I work at admission so it's exciting to me that's happening right now is that we have this organization called the national association for colleges unless you association for college admissions counseling and we it's made up a comprised of higher ed institutions high schools etc the like across the country in the world they've recently run into a case I should say we've recently run into a case where the department of justice has challenged us on some things that we all agreed on and we've taken down some practices that we've all agreed to and that's going to mean that it's going to be a much more free marketplace in terms of the choices that students have we all are accustomed to this may first deadline when people make their options and then it's kind of over well that's kind of over right now so students are going to be having choices and for much longer so it's really up to us to figure out you know what kind of community we want and how welcoming it's going to be knowing that people can certainly go elsewhere I think it's also important to point out that DEI is not just it it's not just something that some people care about but it's something that a lot of people care about in fact one of the things I found was interesting is that the first group said that Becky I'm gonna ask you to help me with this I wrote down bias and discrimination it was number one on the priorities that people seem to care about and in fact as we even look at this new generation of students that are coming into college once again it's fun admissions data because we have to recruit the students right they really care about racial equity it's like number one on their list more than saving the trees or the anything else like that's number one on their list so these are the students who are coming and if we want to keep them then we should probably do the things that they care about so this new goal is where we landed by creating a community in which diversity is visible in its population and culture and by implementing explicit institution-wide practices that advance equity and belonging and I'll turn it over to Karen now so when we took a look at that first goal we recognized kind of the narrowness of that goal and one of the things that we really wanted to ensure that we did in rewriting the goal was that we needed to move away from the kind of vague language to more specific and we really wanted to emphasize that word explicit practices practices suggesting something that is measurable we also wanted to focus on the idea of institution-wide practices that are needed to move the work away from the fringe we really wanted in that first original goal there was this idea of that diversity was going to happen by hiring faculty and staff and recruiting students and that really put the responsibility for diversity on HR and admissions and we talked about this a lot and wanted to kind of in our goal reflect the idea that this really needs to be about creating a community that really advances ideas of equity and inclusion and that it and and that that we all are invested in this and that it doesn't just happen in those two places so that was important we also wanted the new goal to better reflect the current and future community that Shemeika has talked about by expanding the reach to include domestic and international faculty staff and students instead of that phrase mirroring the region and so we really wanted to kind of expand beyond that idea and all of this really comes in the new goal to this idea that progress is really expected now that we need to do we need to be able to take action and so in our going forward we wanted to focus on the retention data and that that needs to be disaggregated so that we see who our students who our employees are and that that should inform our policy and practice and that we also look at not just who we've recruited but if we're retaining we saw some really great data on hiring from the university especially in the area of staff the numbers are really strong but are we keeping people who we're recruiting are people finding this a good culture and environment to stay in we also want to emphasize the need to expand on intervention wellness belonging and cultural competency initiatives there's a there's an exciting faculty fellows program on diversity there's intercultural you we have an NSF grant that is sponsoring along with the provost's office a STEM belonging faculty fellows program how can we help students feel more as though they belong in the STEM majors we want to make sure that we continue to have community dialogue whether those are forums or small group gatherings to have students or employees meeting with administrators and deans so that those are transformative conversations that reflect on practices policies and systems and that really help people because oftentimes we recognize that people need help with engaging with discomfort if we're uncomfortable in some conversations help us with that help us have those conversations a commitment to financial resources the affordability group did a great job on this just a few minutes ago we also want to encourage student perspectives on campus climate with particular attention to how minoritized students report their experience whether that's in campus climate surveys or again in discussions in writing however we can have students voice how they're experiencing the campus and we also this came up in a focus group with underrepresented students just a just a couple of years ago how the physical campus can provide representation the idea of flags on campus postings banners some students found the campus sterile that we have beautiful grounds and beautiful buildings how about murals artwork those kinds of representations on campus and so that was really important in our work and then finally we want everyone to look forward to the equity action plan which launches on February 21st okay thank you okay two minutes quiet thinking okay you're wrapping up you are wrapping up and we're getting ready for the last group and so we know that's a hard spot so we're definitely going to be attentive and i'm going to be sneaking out a little bit in the middle of theirs but cliff timpson's going to take over my role and the truth is you don't really need me anymore because you kind of know the drill so make sure you've got your form circled and you know which one you just did we're switching over now to goal number six sustainability okay good afternoon everyone my name is tim valton i use he him his pronouns i am assistant director in residential life on housing and i kind of want to just preface this by saying that sustainability is a very large goal and it's a very heady kind of idea and i would really encourage you to start reflecting on what a sustainability mean to you we're going to ask you to kind of think a little bit more about that in your groups but just think about that as we kind of show you our work for the past few months hi everyone my name is castie hammond i use she her hers pronouns and i'm the assistant director for international student and scholars initiatives here so the goal we were given was by promoting sustainability as a core principle on campus and in the community so that's kind of vague and it doesn't really give us any idea of what that means so we kind of took a little bit of a step and looked a little bit farther into that and just as a thing this is our committee it's made up of faculty and staff from all over campus and a lot of people that have actually previously served on sustainability groups on campus so our current vision was limited to the scope and functionality of the actual thing so we took a little bit more of a look at that and we looked at a lot of peer institutions that are similar size and state that we're in and we are behind the ball significantly compared to most of our peer institutions a lot of them have offices of sustainability and a lot of things in place and are actively working towards those goals as tim was mentioning it is a multifaceted topic so it's environmental and also human based so we're not just focusing on the environment here we're also focusing on our human part of it as well and we need to assess these efforts across the institution in both educationally and operationally and there's a sense of urgency for that as we all see throughout news and everywhere there's climate changes happening and there's a lot of things impacting our community and our students so as Cassidy said I think the other committee members can kind of agree with me we kind of thought the current sustainability statement was not great when in fact we kind of crumpled it up threw it in the ball threw it in the trash we really felt it was just an advertising ploy from the university the concept of just promoting and not necessarily executing assessing or even development of new innovative ideas was really disheartening to us the good thing is is that we have made significant progress over the past 10 years and we'll share that so the first thing that we decided to do was all of the committee members decided to write their own vision statement what does sustainability mean to you what do you want rw u to commit to over the next five 10 15 20 years after that we kind of all agreed there was kind of bickering back and forth between the environmentalists and the human strategic people but we agreed that we need to make sure that when we're addressing sustainability it's a multifaceted approach human environment and economic so it had to include all aspects of those sustainability there has to be a reference or a focus on educational initiatives all university stakeholders are educators whether you work in financial aid whether you work in facilities whether you're a professor a student life employee your goal is to support our students educational initiatives after that marcie where's marcie hi marcie how are you marcie really brought up this concept and both lorn and charlie are two faculty other two other faculty members really really wanted us to focus on this concept of system thinking processes it's one thing to be able to solve an issue it's another thing to design a system that prevents future issues to happen and then finally we really wanted to make sure that we're really invested in this concept of practical usable lifelong skill development so basically all set i'm not going to read this to you but basically all seven of us decided that these were our top two favorite goals not surprisingly bill seymour and marcie were the ones that we selected which is interesting because bill looks at things very systematically operationally he's the director of facilities and of course marcie's a professor really wanted to think about the institutional learning and from a systems perspective what we decided to do is this this is our new statement rw commits to ongoing collaborations of education inquiry and implementation of sustainable practices which enhance human and environmental well-being on our campuses and in our community and when you're looking at this phrase i would ask you to think about those two core concepts below what does it mean to have human well-being and what does it mean to be environment to basically save our environment when we're looking at our peer institutions in r Island we are the closest to coastal to to to anything sea level changes is going to affect roger Williams first before pc before brown before rick before jaywoo before salve before uri we are doing a disservice to ourselves if we're not planning for the next 30 to 40 years our key findings were very simple the first and foremost is that an office of sustainability must and needs to be initiated within the next two to three years to be able to do the work and be able to spearhead the work currently right now on campus probably about 127 people have responsibilities for sustainability to put it bluntly that is not a sustainable practice there needs to be a common core vision brought from an office of sustainability and we really do envision this office to be able to work with department deans to be able to work with academic deans and develop assessments that really ask the question is who's doing the work in your organization is it effective and what's your impact on the environment the second and we feel the most important part of this is that we need to infuse learning sessions geared towards sustainability practices within first year co-curricular activities currently new first year students aren't necessarily taught how to live a sustainable lifestyle in order for us to create real genuine culture change on our campus we need to begin with our first year students if the first year students learn the way to live sustainable lifestyles they'll bring that to apartment style living and then we can add supplementary education there and finally i'd like to really call out a few student raise your hand if you're in the sus program for the stars yeah look at that they're everywhere great so and where is professor essence there too is he around there he is way in the back so every for the past few years what has happened is that students have been tasked to create an assessment for roger williams in this assessment it's called stars basically we get points to determine where we lay across the entire nation whether we're bronze silver gold or platinum and inside this assessment there's these concepts of low hanging fruit there's points that we don't get because we're not actually putting the effort into it and there's two that i really want to highlight the first is this concept of waste and recycle management assessment we currently don't really have and i work in facilities part time basically there's not a real method to the way that we're doing things students don't know what is recyclable students don't know what is comp compostable we need to do a better job of not only educating our students but when we're bringing in new staff and faculty members they need to be taught and infused in this culture as well the second thing and this is a very simple thing we can get like three points for this is just asking people how do they actually come to campus we don't necessarily think about this from a sustainability perspective but when you think about the carbon emissions that are happening there when you think about the human resources that you could just have a magical conversation like i mean i come sometimes at least that we've got like carpooling right as much as it's nice and it's it's an opportunity for you to to grow as a person so when we're really thinking about this concept of sustainability and i think i only have probably two more minutes left i want you to think about a couple things one are you well now in your current position whether you're a student a faculty or staff member how do you feel do you feel overworked do you feel underworked do you feel like you could do more do you feel like you can't do more i can guarantee you that a large majority of us in myself included know that we are overworked right but why are we overworked is that the systems that we're creating are the inefficient systems how can we change that and two a lot of you have connections with students on a daily weekly monthly classly basis how can you start to infuse sustainability practices in your course load in your department load instead of printing off you know a 12 page syllabus why don't you just email the students right if you're creating a paper form for all of your admissions people to you know create to maybe give like an evaluation or something or any kind of department what's the harm in shifting that department to a to an electronic document when we're starting to think about sustainable practices it's not just human and environment but we need to start thinking about how we're making informed decisions that leave the institution economically more resourceful so i'd ask you to think about that and thank you for your time really do appreciate it hello i'm not the dean uh just to remind you guys um to keep a pace we're at two minutes to quietly reflect on what we just heard and what we're doing with sustainability i know i'm interrupting some good conversations but i would like to close the day today and of course there will be much more opportunity for you to provide the input and carol will be collecting all the stuff you wrote down she sits by the door and will send you an email with a link so that you can if you miss something in the presentations today we have videotaped them so you can you can see them again please encourage your colleagues that weren't able to come to do so as well and there is a written survey so you have a second or third chance if you want to you know vote often and what does it say vote often and vote many times or whatever but again i want to thank the steering committee who is coordinating we're close i work closely with them coordinating the the whole effort um and let me tell you what's going to happen next so we'll collect the input by you and by the colleagues that could not be here today um and we're going to gather it in the steering committee sort it out and give to each of the groups that presented today both the raw information and also some some of our the steering committee's comments to take into consideration after this is done and the plans where the the white papers are revised we're going to forward them to the board of trustees and there is a this at this board meeting that's coming at the end of february excuse me um we have dedicated half a day for the board to to to deliberate and see what we have produced and then give us their feedback and then we'll take their feedback and and bring it back to the groups again and give to each of the entities of the university each of the schools and other groups um all these goals refined with everybody's input to incorporate at their implementation plan so each school for example is going to have take all the goals all the input and incorporate it in their implementation plan the strategic action plan and in addition to the six groups we have another group um that jamie from university college and bob from the provost's office are leading that is looking at the future of learning basically this is an external scan to see what's the state of the art and the future of learning and we'll have another meeting like that where they'll present their great work and again this is not going to be a discussion if it's valid or not because it is what it is this is data of what's happening out there but there'll be another opportunity for us to see what's happening what will be happening in in the in the future of learning so that we can incorporate this thinking and the input from you into the individual plans as well so we incorporate our thinking and also what's happening in in the world and by May we're going to to present again the plans to the board included to these plans will be budgeting so our budget matches the implementation plan and and and by the summer time we probably will have consensus by them and support so we can we can go for it so that's the plan so thank you all for coming I hope you enjoyed the thank you so much for your input this is a plan that we should all own and and I'm sure you'll see your fingerprints at the final at the final version thank you