Follow-up on Community of Practice and Care
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for your patience and ingenuity over the past few days to keep operations running with our network and internet outages. A big thank you to our IT teams and partners for their hard work in addressing the issues and for their diligence in getting our systems up and running as soon as possible.
One of the many things I cherish about our community is our candor, especially in our most challenging moments. Thank you for sharing your feelings and experiences through our leadership “check-ins.” Hearing directly from you helps our leadership teams serve you to the best of our abilities. We were reminded that we must provide space to grieve the losses suffered through the pandemic and acknowledge the increasing demands and professional and personal challenges that many of our community members have been facing.
We also heard much from you that allows us to remain hopeful about the future. At our town hall last Friday, you demonstrated once again what it means to be a community of practice and care. Thank you to those who shared your thoughts and experiences; sentiments like these below from our diverse community members had similar themes of feeling connected and belonging to something larger than ourselves.
- “There has been an unexpected benefit for me through meetings like this, the LOVE program, and the ABRI sessions that have allowed me to get to know people from all different parts of the campus…. I really feel so much more connected.”
- “I’m pleased that Arcadia is leading the way in our conference in terms of taking things seriously and being on point….We are by far doing the best job.”
- “In our community of practice, we have people in our group who are from New Zealand. It’s really nice connecting with people I would never have met otherwise. ”
- From an Arcadian in London: “We have been able to make some great new contacts with colleagues at all levels, which has been really helpful to our work…. Every cloud has a silver lining, and that’s one of them.”
- “Thank you for this becoming my community…. I don’t think that anybody else has it as good as I have had it during COVID and working from home, so I just want to say ‘thank you.’”
- “I really appreciate just being in a place that cares so much about the students coming through our doors and just trying to do everything we can.”
In the coming weeks, we will communicate opportunities including information sessions and town halls on preparing for fall, direction setting and visioning, systematic change, and reorganization and realignments that place student success at the center.
Your contributions, participation, support, and wisdom have been and will continue to be vital in our efforts to inform and position ourselves to work smarter. These community connections will help us create long-term and sustainable University-wide synergies and efficiencies and point us on a clear and deliberate path toward realizing our full potential.
Thank you,
Ajay Nair, Ph.D.
President
March 19, 2021
