Change Agents Shaping Campus Diversity and Equity (CASCaDE)
The CASCaDE initiative is dedicated to creating actionable and evidence-based tools, resources, and knowledge to support change agents in higher education. Equity-minded leadership at all levels is key to driving change across the institution that enables success for all students. Our comprehensive, competencies-based approach gives practitioners a clear path for developing their skills through our toolkit, workshops, and communities of practice.
Our Approach
Distributive Leadership
Strategies Grounded in Evidence
Sustainable Change
Change cannot happen in a silo, so we emphasize coalition and community building to distribute the work and ensure its success.
The Bowman Center is dedicated to translating scholarship into practice, and CASCaDE does this by ensuring all of our services are led by scholar-practitioners and that tools and strategies are evidence-based for effective change-making.
We aren’t in the business of quick fixes. Changing an institution to uplift equitable student success requires ongoing conversations and long-term commitment. Our leadership approach emphasizes sustainability to keep you in the work and support you for the long run.
Leadership for Student Success
Student success is impacted by organizational capacity, leadership practices, and organizational culture as well as student-facing capacities. After all, research shows that students have a higher chance of success in college when they build meaningful relationships with faculty and staff. Working toward student success, therefore, means supporting the wellbeing of the broader institutional community. In order to ensure this expansive vision of a culture of student success, we view leadership through a distributive lens, meaning we do not only approach building the capacities of upper-level administrators. Instead, we help organizations support leaders at all levels, including staff and faculty, to ensure change efforts are meaningful and effective across the organization. By building these organizational capacities, institutions will be better equipped to implement and sustain interventions for the success of all students.
Our Impact
“An unflinching look at the issues and what we likely will continue to face in the future.”
— Workshop Participant
“I enjoyed the different perspectives and advice from the panelists and how they were candid [...] about the situation and the real, actionable advice they gave.”
— Workshop participant
Across our workshops, 91% of participants report they are likely or very likely to recommend the session to a colleague.
Across our workshops, 95% of participants on average report high likelihood of incorporating our tools into their regular practice.
“It was interesting and impactful, because I saw in a number of other small groups that my unit was represented. And so to realize we could be a partner in this work, this isn't something we're doing currently, but overaffirming to realize that others see an opportunity there. I think my biggest takeaway from the program as a whole was the community connections and better understanding how to work with others within the college.”
— Community of Action participant
Leadership Competencies
We measure progress along a path to sustained equity-minded leadership using seven carefully developed, proprietary Leadership Competencies. Our competencies capture ways that higher education leaders can make informed decisions to support equitable institutional transformation.
CASCaDE uses our Leadership Competencies to assess institutional change-readiness and needs for targeted services, primarily offered to institutions engaged in the Higher Endeavor ecosystem. Through the needs assessment process, each of the seven competencies is assessed along a scale of “not yet begun” to “sustained,” indicating the leader’s level of leadership development and guiding our recommendations for continued improvement. Though the scale includes five stages of development, the final, “sustained” stage is not the end of the road: sustaining equity-minded leadership at institutions of higher education requires a demonstrated commitment to continuous improvement through intentional learning and engagement.
Why CASCaDE?
CASCaDE (Change Agents Shaping Campus Diversity and Equity) holds that, like a waterfall, transformative change, and momentum can build from a single individual’s actions. Change Agents, regardless of whether they are formal or informal leaders, can be empowered to cultivate equitable, transformative change on their campuses. Cascades not only signal movement but also growth and renewal, as they bring water essential for life to their ecosystem communities. Rivers also shape their landscapes in crucial ways, carving paths and leaving an indelible mark where they have flowed.