Jordan Harper
It’s hard. I mean, well, what I’m thinking about perhaps builds on both of them in some ways, I am. I’ve been thinking about and wrestling with this question, like, how do we stop ourselves from catastrophizing amidst kind of these like chaos and ambiguous times that we’re in? I think, you know, just in the last couple of days, you know, things that we’ve heard from the administration and how campuses are responding, and I always catch myself and I’m like, Is that the right response, or are we just kind of falling into the trap in some ways?

Keith Edwards
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by a team of scholars who have researched, developed and shared the Shared Equity Leadership Model. This is an empirically based tool to help leaders foster greater equity and inclusion in organizations, I’m so excited to hear from them how this came to be and how they might be utilizing it, how you might be able to utilize it in your leadership, and also what they’ve learned through sharing it and putting it into practice. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs, we release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browser archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience and also by Symplicity a true partner. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him, his,And I’m a speaker, author and coach, helping higher ed leaders and organizations advance leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com and I’m usually broadcasting from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But today I am on the road in Denver, Colorado, at the intersections of the Arapaho ute and other tribal nations. So I’m so glad to our guests for being here for your great work and for sharing it. Love to get some introductions and get you in here to learn a little bit more about you and about the Shared Equity Leadership Model. And Elizabeth, I think we’re going to start with

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
you. Yes. Thank you so much. Keith. I’m Elizabeth Holcombe. I’m a Senior Research Associate at University of Southern California’s polio Center for Higher Education, and I’ve been involved with the Shared Equity Leadership Project since almost the very beginning, 2019 when I went back to USC as a postdoc. I had done my doctorate there, but I’ve studied leadership and organizational change for over 10 years now. I was calculating it before this podcast was like, that’s a good time. That’s a good chunk of time. And then before that, I was actually a leader in Student Affairs at a college in New York. And then before that, a long time ago now, I was an elementary school teacher, so I’ve been working to promote equity in kind of various capacities for my whole career. Thanks so much for having us.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, glad you’re here with the team. Go ahead. Jude, yes,

Jude Paul Dizon
hi, yeah. Thanks again for having us here. I’m Jude Paul Dizon. He, him his pronouns. Currently, I’m an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, Stanislaus, and I’ve been involved with this project ever since it began in 2020 while I was a graduate student at the University of Southern California, working with Adriana keizar. I’ll also mention that prior to being in academia as a faculty member, I was a student affairs practitioner as well working in multicultural affairs, and so I know firsthand from my professional experience the challenges of how to champion and promote and see real equity outcomes over over time. And so for me, it’s been really exciting to be a part of this project and work with the different practitioners and campuses that we’ve been able to interact with as they figure out how to adopt this model and address some of the challenges that they have going on and see some real, tangible change. So thanks again for having me.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, glad you’re here back again a second time, Jordan. Tell us a little bit more about you.

Jordan Harper
Course, thanks for having us. So I’m Jordan Harper. I use he, him pronouns. I’m an assistant professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Morgan State University, which is an HBCU in Baltimore. Super excited to be here, super excited to continue being involved in this project. I was also here from the very start, so it was exciting to kind of see how this work has kind of grown in these different ways, in these different phases, especially as, like, the world is changing a little bit, and we’re seeing just a lot of, you know, just a lot of attacks on dei and equity work. So you know, being able to be involved in this particular project and helping campuses kind of navigate through it all has been really awesome and exciting. And before I started at USC and my PhD program, I was also working in student affairs. And in particular, I did a lot of work in leadership development, student leadership development. So it was really exciting to kind of like join on to this project that was looking at leadership in, like a different way, and I was able to kind of bring in my leadership development experience there. So super excited to be here. And thanks again.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, thanks, Jordan and Angel. Tell us about you. You.

Ángel González
Hola, thank you so much for having us again. Ángel González pronounced here a and I’m currently an assistant professor of higher education, administration and leadership at California State University, Fresno, in the heart of California in the Central Valley. I’m born and raised in Los Angeles to immigrant parents, Miguel Angel Guadalupe from Mexico, and my first generation identity really informs a lot of what I do, along with my Latinx and queer identity, my work in higher education has been positioned in advocating for minoritized communities in different ways through my time as a practitioner in higher education for 10 years, in student life, residential life, academic retention based programs and so forth. And that really has shaped the land that I bring to think about Shared Equity Leadership. I was first engaged in the project, similar Since 2020 but on the other side, at that time, I was a graduate research associate for the American Council on Education, and we’re doing a lot of the thinking around the model and kind of the initial findings of the report of that first paper, and then eventually made my way into USC, working with Adriana as a postdoc, and really then getting to work more closely with the with the project, in this team and this capacity. So it’s really great to think about, how do we strategize to advocate for our student needs and really share this work across the institution?

Keith Edwards
Awesome and Adrianna, as folks have already alluded to, this seems to be all your fault. You’re the orchestrator and the organizer, bringing folks together, connecting. Tell us about you.

Adrianna Kezar
Thanks so much. Keith and I have had such a pleasure being able to work with everyone who’s on this call here. So I am a professor at the University of Southern California, where I’ve been for over 20 years, and I direct something called the Pullias Center of higher education that does research that’s really focused on producing equitable outcomes for students who come from low income, racialized minority and first generation status. Really have a wonderful group of colleagues here at the University of Southern California that includes postdocs and graduate students and research staff, and just so we all have that commonality. I started my career in student affairs and at the University of Michigan, so that’s where a lot of my you know, interest in supporting students stem from, particularly students that have not been well served by higher education and that really committed to my career, that’s been about, how do we create systemic changes in higher education? How do we redesign campuses that were not developed to support the students that are on campuses today, and what is the kind of leadership that’s required to make that happen, and so I really dedicated my career to to that work. So glad to be here today.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, well, why don’t you kick us off here and tell us a little bit about we’re here to talk about the Shared Equity Leadership Model and framework and putting that into practice. I mentioned earlier, it’s empirically based. So we heard a lot of research folks and credentials. Why don’t you tell us Adrianna about how this project came to be and how it emerged.

Adrianna Kezar
So as Angel alluded to, this project stemmed in 2018 from conversations that I was having with staff members at the American Council on Education. They just finished up a grant with the Mellon Foundation, and it was looking at federal data, looking at outcomes for students, and looking specifically disaggregating it by race, but also looking at how the faculty had shifted in terms of demographics and staff and leadership on campuses. And what they were disappointed to find is over the 50 year period that they looked at, there had been much less progress and change than they hope to see for all of the efforts that have been going on. And they came to me sort of seeking some answers about why did we think this was going on? And I said I I wasn’t surprised that we didn’t have the kind of progress. And this is partly due to the research I’ve done over the years showing that, instead of actually redesigning campuses, we’ve just been working on a program here or a service there that’s meant at, you know, correcting deficits in the students. So taking a deficit sort of perspective, rather than thinking about what is, what can we do as institutions to transform and change to support students success. And I said, but this is a research, researchable question. Why don’t we look at campuses that actually have made progress on creating equitable outcomes for students and see what have they done? This is, this is something we can empirically study that so rather than. Looking at the fact that there hasn’t been movement, let’s look at where there has been movement. And so that is where the study originated from. We were lucky enough to get funding at that point from the Sloan Foundation to kick us off and identifying a set of campuses. And what we went in is expecting there be all these different pathways, because we purposefully picked different contexts, like community colleges and small liberal arts colleges and big state colleges, and thought with all these varying because we want to make sure that if we were looking at this, we were addressing the very, very different context there are in higher education, and we were really, honestly shocked to find out that they were all doing something quite similar, which we came to label Shared Equity Leadership, which was this approach to getting faculty, staff, administrators, students, community members, everybody on board to see it as their responsibility, just to support students, especially students who come from low income, first generation and racialized minority backgrounds, and to get this collective sense of responsibility to build it more into their roles and in leading in very different ways, so getting that sense of responsibility and then leading in very different ways. That’s articulated in the model that I won’t go into in any detail, but that gives you a little bit of origin story

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
time in sorry. I think one interesting thing too, that we discovered when we were doing the research is that initially we kind of conceptualized this as being a study about senior leadership teams. We thought that that’s sort of where, like the focus of interest was going to be right. So we were talking to presidents, we were talking to cabinet members, and thinking about how leadership from like that perspective would be shared or kind of collective to support equity. But what we actually found was much more distributed and much broader than that, and it went into the mid levels of leadership, ground level leadership as well. And so we kind of moved from this team framing to this more broadly shared framing. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
that’s that’s really encouraging to hear a bit surprising at first glance, but then not really surprising once you sort of, once you hear it sort of makes sense. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the framework and the benefits of Shared Equity Leadership for advancing equity and inclusion in these institutions. I love how you said, you know, we’re looking at changing institutions, rather than in one offs addressing the harm that’s happening. And it also sounds like a bit of appreciative inquiry, who’s doing this? Well, let’s find out what’s going on there.

Adrianna Kezar
Yeah, I wanted to bring up a few other benefits that I think are particularly important in today’s context. That, you know, the the first that I mentioned, though, is that this is embedding this, you know, it’s making every educator on a campus, regardless of role, think about how they can be contributing to all students succeeding. So it’s just embedding it into each role and and so that’s where we really see culture change, right? So it’s not just one program on the side. It’s shared responsibility for student success. But the other piece, I think, that you know is really critical and beneficial is that now, especially as we see in all these different states, this restrictive or anti dei legislation, there’s not an office that can be targeted that’s doing this work. There’s not an individual or set of individuals that are doing this work. You know, it is broadly distributed, so it’s can’t become such a target as it has become in in the last, you know, couple years. And also, there’s not, like, a single budget. Again, we see many states are saying, who’s doing the work and what’s their budget? And they’re taking away the budget, and they’re firing the people. And this is really particularly beneficial, beneficial in today’s environment, because it isn’t, you know, in a in a siloed into a small area, small set of individuals or budget. So we are finding that that is something that you know used to be at least campuses in certain states need to think about, but now, with the new administration, we you know, people across all states may need to be thinking more broadly about this and how they move towards or adopt this model

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
that might be helpful. And to just talk briefly, we we can’t go into all the detail. We’ll definitely point you towards some of the reports and resources that we have out there to learn more. But the the model is really about both individual and organizational transformation. So I think a lot of approaches to like to leadership and to equity oriented work, tend to target one or the other, right? We’re looking at, like, what individuals can do to make change, or like, what are the organizational policies that we’re going to create that are going to, like, set up the framework for this change. And we really found that both are important and that they work together and kind of like feedback and feed forward into one another. And so the model itself has three main components. And so one of those kind of targeting the individual level is what we call the personal journey towards critical consciousness. And that’s just the idea that the individuals doing this work need to have a personal commitment to it and think about their own identities and their own kind of engagement in the work and how they’re entering the space, as well as a broader kind of structural understanding of what equity and inequity is. And then the second component is a set of values that leaders embody as they’re doing the work. So that’s really sort of how they’re showing up to the work, and then the third component is a set of practices. So that’s like, the actions, the things that people do as they’re going about this work. So, and again, we could talk, like, in a lot more detail about all those practices. I think there’s 16 of them, and there’s nine values. So it’s, it’s not, you know, it’s a complex model. But I think that will just give listeners at least a brief overview of what it what it entails. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
that’s super helpful. We’ll get a link to things in the show notes. There’s a nice spiral visual here, but I think the succinctness of the personal journey, the values and the practices, is really help framing. Jude, what do you want to add here? Yeah,

Jude Paul Dizon
I just wanted to chime in and also just share to what Adriana brought up about, you know, the current political climate. I think, you know, one thing I’ll share is that, you know, I think in the discourse of the last few years, right, folks have been concerned with certain kinds of words and terms being targeted. And I think for you know, what, I’ll just kind of chime in and kind of reiterate in a different ways, that I think a main benefit of Shared Equity Leadership is that, even prior to the political climate of today, right, this model is predicated on someone doesn’t need to have right equity, diversity, inclusion or be in their title, right? So, like, my title is technically assistant professor or instructional academic year, you know, instructor, right? Dei is not in my title, right? But someone in my position can be a part of Shared Equity Leadership and take responsibility and accountability for that work on campus. And so I think that’s something else really important, you know, to keep in mind right now is that you know, regardless of or even through, what is currently going on, right, someone’s title does not necessarily need to have certain words in it for them to take part in this collective effort for change. And I think just one last thing I’ll share is that I think, I think one of the, one of the, I think also novel, interesting findings that folks can read about, you know, through the links that we’ll post later, is that, you know how campuses share in the effort to promote equity, right? There’s not one way to do that. And so something that we haven’t yet mentioned is that we also identified alternative structures to organizing dei work, right? So folks may be most familiar with, I with the notion of a senior level chief diversity officer, and certainly, we did identify that structure as part of as one way that campuses engaged in Shared Equity Leadership. But that was not the only way we had. We identified three additional new organizational models as well. And so I think, for me, when I think about this framework and how it may move forward as that, I think it kind of inspire creative ways right for folks to organize and embed this work for the you know, over time in a sustainable way. I

Keith Edwards
think that makes such good sense, because people are doing this in such different contexts, with different student populations, different institution types, different cultural climates, different pressures, whether it might be from a religious affiliated board versus a legislature, I think giving people so many different pathways, I think sometimes one of the ways we get in our own way is saying there’s a single pathway and here’s an obstacle, right? And so how do we create many different pathways? I’d love to hear from from you all. We talked a little bit about what this is and where it came from, this appreciative inquiry process about folks who are really doing this well, and what you’ve learned right this personal journey, the values and the practices, but you’ve been writing about this, teaching about this, talking at conferences. This is not your first podcast. I’d love to learn. What are you learning? What are you. Encouraging, teaching and seeing others put this into practice.

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
Yeah, so, I mean, it is my first podcast. I’ll be honest, I realized I forgot my pronouns. They’re she, her, hers. So sorry about that everyone. But I know some of the team is a little more experienced on podcasts, but we’ve done a number of different things to promote dissemination of this work. So we’ve with our original partnership with AC, we published six different reports and a toolkit, and I think five of the reports have embedded toolkits as well. So we try to make everything like really practitioner friendly and really action oriented, even when it is based on research, because we want these things to be usable by people who are out there doing the work. Since we’ve all been practitioners ourselves, we’ve also written for a lot of practitioner publications. And when we pick conferences to present at, we’re always making sure that we’re at the conferences where practitioners are too, and not just our research conferences. We’ve also consulted with a lot of campuses and done a lot of workshops for like single campuses or for kind of multi campus organizations to kind of get the word out and help advise them on how they might implement on their own campus. And then we have a current project funded by the ECMC Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, again, working with eight campuses to support to support implementation right, to help them as they put this into practice and as they really get started. And so we’re also learning lessons from them about what does it look like to get started. How can we create more supports and more tools to help campuses that are really trying to do this for the first time. So that’s just a few things,

Adrianna Kezar
so that might help to give people a sense of what these resources are about. So we have one report that’s on, how do you build people’s capacity if you’re going to have more people doing this work, how do you build their capacity to do it so they can do it authentically and do it well, we have another one that Jude was referring to about, how do you organize or structure this work on campuses in very different ways? We have another one on accountability. Your accountability structures have to change if more people are sharing the work. So what does accountability look like under a Shared Equity leadership model? We found that, you know, that’s a real question that people are wrestling with, and it’s really important for them to make progress. We have one on roles. How do you think about if you’re a, you know, in financial aid or a facilities officer or like somebody on the cabinet. How does it look different in different roles? That’s really important to think about. And we have and we call out Student Affairs, and what are the roles they can play. And then emotional labor is a topic that emerges when you’re leading in this different way. There’s a lot of emotional labor, because you’re actually dealing with the trauma that campuses have caused different populations, and how to talk about being successful in in not making that a burden for certain members of the community. So I think these, these reports really dig into a lot of the specifics about flushing out and enacting the model. And

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
don’t sorry, Jude to cut you off, but don’t forget our most recent report that just came out in last month. We keep forgetting about it because it’s

Keith Edwards
so new. That was youngest kid in the family I

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
know, poor forgotten child on challenges to implementing Shared Equity Leadership. So that is available on our Police website, and and, yeah, brand new half the press. I

Adrianna Kezar
was just at a conference, so he pulled me aside and said that before it was so great, I’ve been anticipated all these things that I might encounter. So it’s a great one to start looking at the beginning.

Keith Edwards
Super helpful. And we’ll get, we’ll get lots of these links in the show notes on the website for folks who are listening and want to catch up on all of that.

Jude Paul Dizon
Yeah. So I’ll just kind of add that, you know, for myself, as I mentioned, I currently am an assistant professor, and so I teach in a Doctor of Education Leadership Program and EdD program, where I have students who are scholar practitioners. We’re currently working full time in both higher ed and the K 12 settings, and it’s been so great for me to be able to use all these reports and toolkits in my classes. I’ve taught classes in this program on organizational theory, as well as courses specifically on, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion and education. And so I think, I think the work that we’ve put out there, I think, is really helpful, and in as we are as the model is already meant to break down silos. I think for me, what’s been really great as well is that in these courses that I teach so also kind of break down those silos. And what, you know, how we might think about, what is organizational theory, right, and what what does or does not typically get taught in courses such as that, or, you know, what should or should not get taught in a course on, you know, day. Diversity in education. And so these materials, I think, are really useful, I will say, not just because I’ve been a part of this project, but for my students. I think it’s been really helpful and applicable, both to not only the higher ed students, but the students who, again, also work in the K 12 settings, and for them to be exposed right to these models of how we collectivize action for equity, and also, I think, for really speaking to the needs of folks now on the ground, to have frameworks to start implementing already right in daily practice. I think the toolkits and the reports have great value for the immediate and so I really encourage folks listening in if you are teaching, you know, for those who are, who are in teaching positions, to really think about utilizing the reports and the toolkits, which have, you know, actionable activities that you can implement into the classroom, to think about it and using it in that way as well.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I mentioned our evolve program at the beginning, which is for senior leaders around leading for equity, and this is one of the frameworks we use. And what’s been really useful is, as Elizabeth was alluding to, what are my values, what are the ways that I engage, and then what is the organization’s values, the institution’s values, and what is my role and what is needed, and seeing where that alignment is really there, and where it’s not quite like I’m not really good at this thing, but this is what my organization needs, and no one else really does that, so I got to really lean into that, or I know now that this is a strength I really bring. And so it’s been really helpful for these leaders to reflect on alignment, misalignment. Organizational need personal strengths and talents and bring more awareness to their leadership, rather than leading the way they they are used to and are comfortable, but saying, Okay, I gotta really leverage this, or I gotta really lean into this thing, because although I don’t like giving talks in front of a bunch of people, neither does anyone else on my senior team, so I’ve gotta be the one out there doing that and bringing that so that that. And I think Adriana, I think you used the word authentic, and I think that’s what it’s helping people do, is not just be who they are or what the organization needs, but be authentically who they are and align that with that. I’m wondering if any of you would like to say a little bit more before we learn, move to some of the learning about this current landscape around dei tool for campuses, and maybe navigating some of the restrictive legal environments.

Adrianna Kezar
One of the things I can mention is just having been in DC at a conference that and it was and we were talking about Shared Equity Leadership, is they were all saying how absolutely valuable this has been for them, particularly because many of them came from states where their restrictions but that what they’re really focused on is just reframing some of the language. So diversity, equity, inclusion may not be okay in their state environment, but they can do inclusive excellence. They can do belonging, they can do access and opportunity. So we talked a lot about continuing the work and and people said, like, Shared Equity Leadership is not being problematic in any particular way, that equity is still a goal that people, you know campuses believe in. And so we were just getting some of the continued resonance about the model, even within this political environment, and what is some of the work that campuses are doing to continue it, but yet, with some of the restrictions that are very specific to diversity, equity, inclusion, language mean, the

Keith Edwards
language earlier of every educator helping all students succeed seems like something everyone would want across different political perspectives and ideas, that seems like something we can all get behind, and this is a method to doing that. Yeah, and

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
I’ll just chime in with one more thing, because we are working with campuses right now that are trying to do this, and so they’re responding in real time, and we’re working with them in real time, and you know, we’re all kind of getting the newest updates as they come and like navigating this together. But in a meeting that Jude and I had, I think yesterday, or maybe the day before, they the campus we were working with, was talking about, you know, how equity is a problematic word in their context, and so they’re thinking about words they can use instead of equity. And we really just encourage them to think about, you know, shared leadership broadly, right? Like shared leadership, the share the process of sharing leadership, the process of collaborating to take responsibility for whatever the work is, and they can call it whatever. Or they need to call it, you know, I think one thing that this particular campus is doing that I think was really smart is looking at their institution strategic plans and institutional priorities, and they are around student success, right? Like, it’s kind of crazy that we’re even having to have these conversations, because, like, we all care about student success for all the students on our campuses. But so really thinking about, how do they connect to that language of the strategic plan, language of their institutional goals and mission, and then, like, using this broader framework of like, how do we do this work collectively, and how do we make sure that we are all taking responsibility for it? So I think, you know, the framework is still helpful regardless of what verbal gymnastics we’re trying to do to make it possible,

Jude Paul Dizon
yeah, yeah. And I’ll also add that I think, you know, this framework is, I think, inspiring folks that we are working with to really think creatively and expansively about who else to bring into this work. And so one campus, for instance, is, think is beginning their strategic plan around Shared Equity Leadership, again, regardless of whether or not they’re using that actual term, but they’ve begun the drafting of their strategic plan with human resources. And so they so this plan’s first draft is using, you know, human resources. Language that you know, from my assumption, is language that is probably not going to catch anyone’s attention, language that people probably are going to be approving of. And so then this plan is now going to be looked at by folks involved in access and opportunity and Student Affairs. And so for this campus, particularly Human Resources hasn’t really been involved, according to our folks in processes such as this. And so I think this is just an example of the ways in which the model is inspiring folks to really think broadly about who else can be involved in this work, other than the, you know, quote, unquote obvious people. And then in that way, I think being able to be strategic and building that collective buy in campus wide.

Ángel González
Yeah, and I’ll chime in a little bit too in that realm around being creative and expensive of this work for me as somebody who’s a community college scholar, I often think about how Community College has always done equity and diversity and access work without having these fancy titles for their positions, so it gives us an opportunity to return to other institutions and think about, how have they strategized around these efforts for so long? Because we saw the rise of these roles over the last decade, in particular, in these four year contexts, and kind of then siloing that work to those individual roles. And that’s kind of where this issue has come about, where then it’s so easy to be targeted, so to dismantle it so easy to be relegated to the sides and the margins of an institution. So I like to think like, what can we learn from our other institution types? To think about, how have they been doing this work? It didn’t have that title, but it was always about doing equity, access and Student Success work for our minoritized students. Right? As a community college, we enroll most of minority students in the country, so some of our campuses that we work at are providing that specific lane, like, Okay, now we have to pivot again. And we’ve been here before. It just looks a little different. And I think what the model allows is also your don’t have to do all the values at once, all the practices. Right is across these different people, across these different roles, we hold them together, right? And then we’re able to lean on each other, like, who’s the homie that can do this? Let’s hit them up and let’s have them be part of this team. Let’s make sure that they’re leaving with that strength, right? So I think that’s the beautiful part about this model, is that it really is about also that vulnerability, like, I don’t know this part, but that’s why building that team in a very specific way is so important, because then we’re able to really anchor this work across the institution. So for me, that’s been something really neat to see in these times, and moving and continuing this work forward. And we’re like, Wait, we’ve been here before, and how do we listen to these people that maybe didn’t have these titles or these roles in this way that we might also learn from from them and and in the work that we’re doing with our campuses, those communities of practice are really important for them to kind of lean on each other and learn about practices, to kind of strategize in this current time.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, thank you. It’s great to have your voice in here at Hell, and we want to get Jordan in here too. I want to turn to the two of you to think a little bit about, or not think about, but if you could share with us a little bit about what you’re learning, right? Did you say this started in 2020? Obviously the research you develop is you start talking about you start sharing it, and then you’re thinking, Oh, why didn’t we think of that? Or someone says this, or as Adriana was pointing to getting feedback from folks, how helpful this is. So what are you learning as this shared and this idea emerges?

Jordan Harper
Yeah, well, we’re definitely learning a lot. I think, you know, first and foremost, I think we saw this very early on, but people are hungry for this type of work and for this model, you know, we’ve seen it kind of gain traction at a lot of different campuses, which has been awesome. Just like Adriana and other folks were saying, you know, you go to conferences and people. Like, Oh, I’m assigning this, or we’re doing this on my in my respective college or department. And it’s like, really awesome to just hear the positive feedback about the model itself, which has just been great. And I think what we’re also seeing is a kind of change in how people are understanding or even conceptualizing leadership, which is really nice. I think, you know, people oftentimes think of leadership as, like, solely positioned and not really process. And a particular model like this really kind of forces people to engage the leadership process and understand leadership from that particular standpoint. So I think we’re seeing, in some ways, has kind of changed in how higher education, just everyday people, right, are looking at leadership differently and really kind of approaching the topic of leadership differently, which is really important when it comes to equity work dei and just shared leadership more broadly. I think the other thing that we’re seeing kind of aligned with that is that, you know, we’re watching in real time, kind of the senior leaders, grassroots leaders, kind of working together, putting their heads together to kind of figure out what this all means and what this all looks like on their respective campuses, which, again, is a really important approach When it comes to doing this difficult type of work, and I think more so in this kind of new phase that we’re in with Shared Equity Leadership in the campuses that we’ve been talking to, we’re watching people kind of use we’re watching people in campuses use Shared Equity Leadership as a base, and they’re like, really building upon it, which is really nice. You know, I’m thinking about campuses that we’re working with that are doing really important work to bring in different kind of perspectives and different literature and different topics and conversations, to really figure out what Shared Equity Leadership would look like on their specific campus, and how can be responsive to the needs of their specific students. You know, we, you know, we, this is an empirically built model, but it’s not a catch all, like people have to kind of modify it in the ways that they need to on their respective campuses, to support their students in their particular state context too, which is really important. And then the last thing I’ll say before I pass it to Angel is I think we’re also seeing like real time, like implementation challenges, so as the kind of state context or the federal context is changing, you know, campuses have to be responsive to those things. And I think we’re just we’re watching how important it is to give, like, the practical tools and advice to these particular campuses. So we have spent a lot of time in these last couple of months, you know, talking to campuses and understanding what particularly is happening on your particular campus and your particular state context. And how can we help you be responsive to that? How can we help you in those particular ways. So even things like getting buy in may look different and maybe a little difficult on certain campuses. I think some of our campuses that we’ve been talking to have been dealing with leadership turnover and leadership changes. So like just watching that in real time, I think we have become really aware that, you know, they need real time help, and they also need real time, kind of practical skills and tools to be responsive to those things. So I’ll pass it on to Angel. You have anything to add?

Ángel González
Ditto, everything you said. And I think with the model, what I’ve seen in the work we’ve done in the last couple of months is it’s providing that anchoring for folk in the midst of chaos. So going back to that idea of the foundation as a starting point. It kind of comes back like, okay, here we are again. How do we strategize forward? Right? Who are we? Where am I in my journey? What are our value like? Kind of that, that that cyclical, reflexive process that I think is so needed to sustain this work in leadership, right? It’s not linear. It’s not just you do this plus this equals that, but really it necessitates its ongoing reflexivity with the individual and their teams and then their institutions. So again, that interconnectedness of individual to structural, and we’ve seen it played out with the folks that we’re working with, how Jordan was mentioning in real time, as they, you know, kind of had this plan, and then we meet again, and they’re like, something happened. Let’s recalibrate, right? But there’s somewhere to recalibrate. There’s a buffer to recalibrate within, versus just like a blank slate, and we’re at zero again. So I think that’s what it’s been offering some of these folks. It’s kind of like that, that grounding that we need, right? In particular, with all the different legislative information that we’re get, getting, is like, Oh, this is happening. It says this. It offers them? Well, what is it not saying, right? Where is that opportunity that, of like it didn’t say this. So within that, what is within the model that allows us to advance strategies, opportunities, to again, center, student success, center, student well being, to ensure that we’re still committed to the mission of the institution, and I would say the higher education enterprise, right? So I think I. We’ve I’ve really enjoyed kind of CO creating with our campuses in that way, and kind of learning how this model, again, continues to shift and mold, because it’s never intended to be static, but rather a model that’s informed through those experiences of the practitioners, right as well as they’re the ones implementing this work

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
absolutely. And I’ll just chime in with one other kind of smaller learning. I guess that that, like I mentioned, we’ve been doing coaching meetings with our campus teams, and one of the meetings this week, like the team leads are so amazing and so knowledgeable and experienced, and like just this week, one of them was telling us how they’re they’re working through the planning process, right of like, setting their goals and strategies that they want to accomplish using Shared Equity Leadership over the next couple of years. And they mentioned, you know, this team member who, they said, You know, I realize that this team member, their strength is not coming to not setting a goal. Like, they’re not great with setting the goal. All semester, they were asking me, but what’s our goal? Like, what’s our goal? What are we working towards? And so I just realized, like, this is not the time for them to be super involved. Like, once we have the goals, they’re really excellent at helping us strategize how to reach those goals, but they’re just in their head because we don’t have the goals yet. And so, so I told them, like, you know, I think your time is going to come in about like, three to four months, and then you can step back onto the team. And so I think even just things like that, like seeing how some of our team leaders and facilitators are working with their teams over time, like, like recognizing the strengths and and, you know, areas of growth for their team and helping them, kind of like step in or step back at different times. I just think that’s such a good example of the model as a whole, which is all about, like, leaning into your strengths in different areas and letting others step forward and knowing when to step forward or when to step back.

Keith Edwards
It’s a it’s a really helpful model without being prescriptive. It’s not like do these five things in this order, but what do you now return to the values you’ve had this misstep now, which practices now might be more important, and maybe in a year, different practices will be and where are you and I this? The thing we keep coming back to is multiple pathways, and then the other thing we keep coming back to is the individual and the system, the individual and the structure, the individual and the institution, and not seeing those as separate. But how do we bring that together? Really useful, all right? Well, believe it or not, we are, we are starting to run out of time, and we’ve got five of you. I want to get each of you to chime in on our final question. The podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. We always like to end by asking, what is it that you’re thinking, troubling or pondering now? And if you want to share where folks can connect with you, please go ahead and share that information. So Adriana, what are you troubling now.

Adrianna Kezar
Thank you, Keith. So I think that as I’ve been engaging with the model for many years, people really resonate with the personal journey, and it’s I’m so glad that that is something that people connect to and understand, and they also really understand practices. Because we, I think, like that is, you know, something that we’re always saying, What can we do? Right? What I ponder is the values, which I’m really glad that you brought up several times, but I do see when I go out to talk about the model that the values people sort of appreciate them, yet feel they’re more squishy for them. But one of the things that really hit me in our conversations doing the research was why values permeated. It was such a central part of the model is that we’re talking about transforming cultures, and you can’t transform cultures without people being and showing up differently. And it’s really the sense of being that I want to leave people with here that we’re not just talking about, because there’s so many, I think, as you were saying prescriptions out here about do this or do that, and if we want to change our campus cultures, we need to show up differently. We need to show up with love and care for our students and for each other. And there’s a lot of distrust between faculty and administrators, for example, right now, and we need to start to feel differently towards each other if we’re all going to work together to support student success. So I just, I’ll leave you with that, love it. I love it.

Keith Edwards
Angel what’s what are you pondering now?

Ángel González
I’ll return to a little bit of what you mentioned in the beginning and building off Adriana around courage, right? I’m really thinking of. Out the the ways that we must be courageous in these times. And you know, Shared Equity Leadership is just one of the many tools in our repertoire to be courageous, to know that we’re not alone, to know that we don’t have anything to start from. We have a ground. We have a foundation. And in times like this, this is where we where we must be courageous, right? I think about ancestors who led revolutions and have led in different capacities. I’m pretty sure they were afraid, but I’m pretty sure their courage was stronger than their fears. So I’m really thinking about that as I teach in the higher ed program my master’s students and really helping them, you know, really ground themselves, that they are the future of this field, and that I need them to be courageous, and I will be courageous with them as we lead together.

Keith Edwards
Oh, so I mean, you, Jordan, you got to follow love and courage. Sorry, sorry,

Speaker 1
It’s hard. I mean, well, what I’m thinking about perhaps builds on both of them in some ways, I am. I’ve been thinking about and wrestling with this question, like, how do we stop ourselves from catastrophizing amidst kind of these like chaos and ambiguous times that we’re in? I think, you know, just in the last couple of days, you know, things that we’ve heard from the administration and how campuses are responding, and I always catch myself and I’m like, Is that the right response, or are we just kind of falling into the trap in some ways? So I’ve been kind of thinking on a question I think really does build upon what Adriana and Angel have shared, and also has been thinking about the importance of organizing right like, you know, just building kind of coalitions and building across different groups and even identities and differences in these particular times, and how important it is, and how something like organizing does map on to so much what we shared today about Shared Equity Leadership,

Keith Edwards
wonderful. Thank you. Jude, what’s with you now?

Jude Paul Dizon
Yeah, thanks. I will just add to what folks have shared so far, and what I’ll add is, you know, one part of the model that I don’t think we kind of highlighted yet so far in this conversation is that a core value right within Shared Equity Leadership is centering students, and specifically what all I think right now, I think it’s really important to remember, how do we center the most vulnerable, the most minoritized students? And so I think that, again, regardless of whatever words a campus may or may not be able to use how campuses may be responding, either out of fear or true mandate around whatever political or legislative climate. I really do encourage folks right now to think about how are your actions as an institution, centering students, centering the most minoritized, most vulnerable students. How do we ensure that whatever we think we may have to do if it’s not going to center students, you know? How do we maybe navigate that and circumvent that in a way that is allows it to continue centering and serving students? Right? And I guess I would also say that it is really important to be mindful that as we are afraid to use certain terms, that’s that some of those racing terms are being co opted to do the opposite of centering students, right? And are some of these terms are being co opted to harm students. And so I would just encourage folks to be mindful and critically aware of such a such efforts as that as well.

Keith Edwards
Yeah. Thank you, Elizabeth. Final word,

Elizabeth M. Holcombe
yeah. I mean, I think, like all my colleagues and everyone doing this work, it’s impossible to not be thinking about the current political climate and just the like fire hose of things that are coming at us every day. And I think it’s really easy to get caught up in the cycle, like Jordan mentioned, of feeling like chaotic and and feeling hopeless, you know, just feeling really discouraged and disheartened and invalidated and but I’m also really, you know, I want to make space for that, like that feeling is real, like the sadness is real, The anger is real, like, that’s that’s really real. But I also have been like, you know, the work continues, and working with practitioners every day, like, gives me so much hope and inspiration, because they’re really thinking creatively about how they’re going to keep doing the work and like, how to keep going to make their campuses more equitable, like, regardless of what is coming at them from the outside. And so I really just think about that duality of, like, making space for for the difficult emotions that we all have, but not getting stuck there, right? And like, really clinging to that hope and looking for that inspiration where we. Find it like from the people who are doing the work every day? Yeah?

Keith Edwards
Well, I love this notion of critical hope, which is better as possible, and we can be a part of making it happen, right? Yeah. So I love that, and this has been great. I think I’m leaving this conversation feeling inspired, but also I think you’ve been really helpful for practitioners about how they can do that. So thank you all so much for your leadership and your research and your sharing of this. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode, Evolve in Symplicity. Evolve help senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership as a program I am a part of along with my colleagues, doctors Brian Rao and Don Lee, we offer a personalized experience with high impact value. The asynchronous content, six individual and six group coaching sessions, maximize your learning and growth with a focus time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change and Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals, a true partner to the institution. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including, but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being, student success and accessibility services to learn more. Visit symplicity.com. It’s always a huge shout out to our producer Nat Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work. And we love your support for these conversations. You can really help support us by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube or our weekly newsletter. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to the fabulous guest today and to everyone who’s watching and listening. Make it a great week.

https://pullias.usc.edu/project/shared-equity-leadership