by Ken O’Donnell
For several years NASH has played an outsized role in supporting the emerging field of High-Impact Practices, dear to my heart. It has scheduled national meetings adjacent to the HIPs in the States conference series, and used a significant grant from Lumina Foundation to add to the field’s knowledge base, collecting its findings at an interactive, extremely engaging web site.
The tiny organization punches well above its weight by leveraging personal connections and friendships, and delegating freely. Its animating idea is Collective Impact, structured collaboration across sectors and distances to unite a range of organizations, disciplines, and cultures in a common purpose. At NASH convenings you hear colleagues from different ends of the same system office confess they’re meeting each other for the first time.
When I joined this effort I worked at one of those system offices, the California State University. The CSU employs and/or educates around half a million people, making it larger than 30 sovereign nations. In this context, you either make your impact collectively or you don’t make it at all.
Since leaving HQ for CSU Dominguez Hills, I’ve noticed that campus administration also benefits from a Collective Impact approach. I recently talked about this with Jane Close Conoley, president of Cal State Long Beach. She draws from her disciplinary background in education psychology, and she is a fan of Collective Impact.
As a CEO she can’t fuss over many details, but she pays inordinate attention to team dynamics. To her the job is mostly about making each person in the room feel like a balanced participant, valued, heard, and positioned to contribute. Each of those interpersonal connections is a resource, and not low-maintenance. “You can’t let these relationships just go,” she told me. “It’s like raising children. You aren’t ever done.”
Jane Close Conoley is President at California State University Long Beach
Collective impact toward . . . what exactly? Promoting the equitable delivery of our best, highest impact educational practices. And for that I discovered the President and I admire the same educational thinker – not a contemporary, but one who’s been dead for fifteen years, longer than the phrase “HIPs” has even been around.
But more on that later. Part 2 coming in February 2021.