Maddie and Makena worked throughout the year to continue to build out their more sustainable model for the Leadership Institute. New to this year, they established the Leadership Fellows as a Steering Committee for the following year’s Leadership Summit. This move meant that the academic year’s fellows would plan the next year’s Leadership Summit, resulting in increased graduate student voice in the planning of the Summit and less summer labor needs. Additionally, they worked to further build buy-in across campus, connecting with the Colleges of Human Medicine, Nursing, and VetMed about establishing a fellow in their colleges for the year 2020-2021. Due to a change in Graduate School staff, this particular effort had to be put on hold. They also built additional relationships across campus, welcoming more speakers, professional development leaders, and “resource people” connected to leadership and change-oriented work within our community. Also of note was their work on programmatic assessment. The two worked with Fellows to create a new assessment protocol of fellowship growth and program success. Due again to a change in Graduate School staff, this effort was also put on hold. Finally, the Leadership Summit saw an increase in participation, they were successful in adding an additional 5 fellows to the Leadership Fellowship program this year and had their programming not been impacted by COVID-19, the Leadership Showcase would have seen an increase in attendance as well. Navigating the move to a remote campus, they have shifted their efforts to digitally celebrating and showcasing the work of the 2020 Academy Cohort, as well as the 2019-2020 fellows.
In their first year as Co-coordinating Fellows, they worked to create a standardized structure for fellows activities. More intentional professional development and peer-to-peer resource sharing were built into group meetings. The competency framework and connected application process were formalized and implemented to increase transparency and equitable access to opportunities. The structure of each component of the Leadership Institute (Summit, Academy, Fellows) was aligned to a common framework- increasing scaffolding across programming- and the Fellows as a steering committee for the next academic year’s Institute was piloted. There was also a shift of the Academy Showcase to a public facing event where all Academy participants plus some of the Fellows presented their work to Deans, Associate Deans, faculty, friends, colleagues, and family.
