Dear friends,
As we move to the new academic year, we’re also shifting into new modes of work in our offices. The Paradigm Project is progressing steadily, and we look forward to sharing more soon. What we can share now is that we are at work. Whether it is taking on new leadership positions or preparing for a new semester of teaching, we are graciously and gratefully adding to our already full plates. To help support our growing portfolios, our team has expanded. We have two new team members to introduce and more detailed updates to share.

Introducing New BT2P Staff

Kate Griffin, Associate Director

Greetings friends, I’ve been with BT2P on and off since 2019 and I’m happy to be formally rejoining the team as BT2P’s Associate Director. In my previous experience with BT2P, I co-led the PLACE Collaboratory with David and a wonderful community of students, faculty, and community leaders working on humanities-based civic engagement projects, and I have helped to conceive and design the Paradigm Project, BT2P’s major new initiative around the movement for holistic and transformative change in higher education. My current work with BT2P includes leading strategy and design for the Paradigm Project along with our movement-building, narrative change, and fundraising work. I’m also working with many of our collaborators on an online, multimedia book about the PLACE Collaboratory (coming by the end of 2023!). In addition to my work with BT2P, I am a leadership coach who works with people in the arts and culture, social change, and higher education sectors and do strategy, design, and changemaking consulting, including a current project I’m really excited about supporting program design for One Earth Sangha related to Buddhist engagement on the climate crisis. I live in Berkeley, California where I practice meditation, wrangle a middle-schooler, and read, talk, and occasionally do things related to creativity, spirituality, and the polycrisis. It’s great to be part of the BT2P community and I look forward to (re)connecting with you. You can reach me at [email protected].

Gillian Perry, Communications Coordinator

Hello all! I’m so honored to be joining BT2P as the new Communications Coordinator. I’m originally from California and in a lot of ways that still feels like home. After earning my undergraduate degree in English at UC Berkeley, I worked in academic publishing in San Francisco, dreaming of pursuing my true passion: writing fiction. That led me to North Carolina, where I graduated from the MFA program in fiction at UNC Greensboro and taught first-year writing and literature courses. As an educator, writer, and life-long learner, I’m so excited to put my passion for writing and higher education to work! In addition to bringing you Bringing It I’ll also be running BT2P’s social media channels, working with our amazing student interns, and assisting with larger public narrative initiatives. You can reach me at [email protected].

Updates from Current BT2P Staff

Paul’s New Leadership Positions

Throughout my career, the network of higher education organizations has shaped my identity as an educator, scholar, and changemaker. That is why I am thrilled to join the Board of Directors for Project Pericles, a consortium of colleges and universities supporting civic engagement and social responsibility in higher education. I am also beginning my position as the Chair of the National Advisory Board for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium of over 70 higher education members that is working on issues of campus-culture change, public scholarship and art, and community-cultural organizing. Both Project Pericles and Imagining America have had rich relationships with Bringing Theory to Practice and with many leaders in our campus-based network. (David Scobey helped to found Imagining America and serves as an advisor for Project Pericles.) I see my leadership roles as strengthening the movement for broader civic and social justice purposes in higher education and will work to connect networks together. –Paul

Todd’s Relationship-Rich Course

This fall I am excited to again teach a first-year seminar at Elon as part of the university’s Core Curriculum. Aligning with BT2P’s mission, the focus of the seminar is to examine the purposes of higher ed and how to transform it to better support all students, faculty, and staff. This fall I will be incorporating Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education, co-authored by our Elon colleagues Peter Felten and Leo Lambert, along with Isis Artze-Vega and Oscar Miranda Tapia (and featured in a recent issue of Bringing It). I will pair the reading with a workshop at Elon’s Center for Design Thinking that focuses on cultivating mentoring constellations on campus. I look forward to seeing how the students engage with the topic and learn about the principles of design thinking along the way.  –Todd

As a team, we’re bolstered by our growth and upward momentum. We wish you health and success in this upcoming semester.

With gratitude for you and all you do,

David, Gillian, Kate, Paul and Todd

Bringing Theory to Practice
Elon University
www.bttop.org