Bringing It #74: Updates, Opportunity, and Congratulations

Dear friends,

We hope you are doing well and taking care as we approach the end of the semester. This issue of Bringing It brings multiple announcements: a fond farewell to one of our team members, the announcement of a job opportunity with BT2P, updates about participants in The Way Forward initiative, and news of the publication of our latest Newsletter. We thank you for reading these updates, and encourage you to reach out with any questions or comments.

Farewell and Thanks to Kate

It is with great sadness that we let you know that Kate Griffin has moved to the Bay Area to be closer to family and take up an exciting new position as Executive Director of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust, a non-profit supporting a Native tribal community in California. For the past two years, Kate has been a wonderful colleague and friend. As co-leader with David of BT2P’s PLACE Collaboratory, she was a linchpin in building PLACE’s extraordinary network of educators, students, and community partners committed to social change, educational innovation, and the power of the public humanities. Kate embodies a rare mix of gifts: she is a skilled leader, a strategic organizer, a discerning analyst, and an empathetic community-builder. Even in a time of endless Zoom meetings, she brought warmth, joy, and her whole self to the work of social change, student learning, and community collaboration. We will miss her, but our sadness is lessened by the knowledge that she is passionately committed to the well-being and rights of Native communities and that she will do great things in her new position. Thank you, Kate.

A Search For a New Colleague

One of Kate’s most important contributions to BT2P was to help envision and plan an important new initiative, the Paradigm Project. This will be a multi-year effort aimed at catalyzing systemic change in undergraduate education — change that responds to the current turmoil in higher ed with new models of holistic, inclusive learning, a renewed commitment to the core purposes of such learning, and a growing movement to realize it. This will be BT2P’s most ambitious undertaking, the focus of our work in the coming years, and we look forward to telling you more about it in future issues of Bringing It. For now, we want to announce a national search for a new colleague to contribute to this effort.

The Senior Project Manager (SPM) will work with David to launch and guide the Paradigm Project. The project will combine public outreach, the creation and support of design teams and advocacy networks, and engagement with educational decision-makers, and the Senior Project Manager will be integrally involved in all phases. Given the ambition and scale of the project, we are looking for a skilled and experienced colleague: someone who can integrate organizing, relationship-building, and the management of a national project, someone who is knowledgeable and passionate about higher education. It is a tall order; we hope you can spread the word and help us find the right person. The full position description and online application are available on the Elon University job site. We will begin to assess applications on January 7.

Fall Newsletter Now Online

We’re pleased to announce the publication of BT2P’s Fall Newsletter, focused on the theme of “Social Justice and Higher Education.” It features four articles that explore recent initiatives on different campuses to integrate social justice and equity-mindedness with innovations in curriculum and faculty development, pedagogy, and community partnerships. Our goal, as ever, is to lift up the work of our community of educators and innovators, presented in their own voices. We offer many thanks to all contributors to the Fall Newsletter, and appreciate their exploration of this theme that is a core priority of BT2P’s work and community building efforts.

Congrats and Kudos to a Member of The Way Forward Grants Cohort

Just down the road in Greensboro, our friend and TWF grantee Diya Abdo has been doing amazing work to support refugee resettlement and to provide health care to marginalized communities through the Center for New North Carolinians and Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR).

UNCG, their academic institution, has recently won a national community engagement award and ECAR has received an award from the J.M. Kaplan fund. We feel fortunate to have Dr. Abdo as a member of The Way Forward cohort; she and her team are doing great things. Please join us in congratulating them!

With thanks for everything you do,
David, Kelly, Todd, & Gianna