Caring Campus Initiative Committee Presents Recommendations for BMCC

Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) hosted a Caring Campus Initiative virtual follow-up session September 22 outlining the committee members behavioral commitment recommendations for the campus community. The committee suggested that their recommendations be implemented campus-wide as soon as possible or by Spring 2021.

Earlier this year, through a partnership with the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC), BMCC launched the Caring Campus initiative committee of more than 50 BMCC department managers and staff members. Brad Phillips, president and chief executive officer of the IEBC facilitated the BMCC team along with Dean of Student Affairs Michael Hutmaker.

“Staff members are often are the first to have contact with students when they’re looking for assistance,” said Hutmaker. “We’re all here to help each other help our students.”

Specifically, BMCC’s Caring Campus project has been focused on institutionalizing behaviors and actions that create a more welcoming campus environment for students. Over the past few months, the committee met several times and created six initial campus behavioral commitments for both the traditional and virtual space.

At the same time, the project seeks to help professional staff connect with one another and create a uniform and positive college environment through consistent behaviors across various departments throughout the campus.

“Part of our strategic plan is a major focus on really connecting with the students and showing them BMCC is not only an excellent academic institution but a caring one,” said Erwin Wong, Provost at BMCC.

After welcoming the group, Vice President of Student Affairs Marva Craig acknowledged the broad representation from departments across the college.

“You are here because you were specifically chosen by your supervisor to be part of this effort,” said Craig. “We’re including you as ambassadors and we want you to lead and continue the work of care beyond formal training, we’re including you as we increase the level of care in what we do on a daily basis.”

Phillips explained that the over-arching goal of the project is to make each and every student feel welcome and a sense of connectedness to BMCC.

Research indicates that student support staff and other professionals across campuses can contribute substantially to enhancing student connectedness, thereby increasing the likelihood students will attain their educational goals.

“Students come where they feel welcome and they stay where they feel cared about,” Phillips said.

He said the BMCC project is engaging professional staff who are often missing from typical student success efforts.

Caring Campus Initiative committee details efforts

Caring Campus committee members will work together to develop a roll-out for the initiative’s behavioral commitments. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University, which partners with IEBC will be studying the impact of the BMCC project and interviewing the BMCC participants.

Committee member Beth Cooperman, an ASAP Career and Employment Specialist, provided an overview of the group’s work and explained how during the first session, they created a set of general behavioral commitments.

“These are the methods we were going to use to create a caring campus,” said Cooperman.

In the second session, the group developed an implementation plan to determine how the commitments will be applied. The third session focused on a monitoring plan that will allow observation of the evidence that the commitments are taking place. Finally, the group developed a communication plan.

Associate Director of BMCC’s Enrollment Services Contact Center Katty Cherubin explained how the general Caring Campus behaviors can be carried out. For example, she said, when welcoming a student, address them by name. Also, each department should develop a brief description of what it does and a set of FAQs that is distributed to all staff, she explained.

“If a staff member cannot solve a student’s specific problem, then walk the student to the personnel specialized in resolving that student’s concern,” said Cherubin.  “And while we’re living in this virtual world, every Zoom call will address expectations and provide guidance for a positive student experience. Follow up communication for assured resolution and student satisfaction should also be sent to every attendee of a call.”

Andy Pina, an Academic Advisor in the CUNY Edge program outlined the committee’s implementation plan for the overall initiative.

“Our goal was to determine when and how the behavioral commitments would take place,” Pina said. “To summarize, we recommend that most commitments take place in the Spring and Fall.”

Pina said some training would be necessary, so those commitments might be delayed. However, he said, all staff should be engaged in the behaviors and committee members will be looked to for leadership so as to reinforce outcomes.

Director of Assessment at the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics Bryan Dowling discussed how the plan would be monitored.

“Our goal was to make sure that the behavioral commitments would take place and that managers take a positive approach in ensuring this occurs,” said Dowling. “We recommend that the staff can self-monitor their engagement in the commitments.”

To make certain everyone at BMCC is aware of the Caring Campus and its behavior commitments, Center for Career Development Advisor Jay Francisco and Irene Cheng, a counselor in the Counseling Center detailed a communication plan. They said they identified four groups to make aware of the work: colleagues, leadership, faculty and students.

Recommendations include discussions of caring campus take place at cabinet and department meetings. Academic departments will create strategic efforts to share the initiatives with faculty.

After the presentations, Neda Hajizadeh, Director of the BMCC Counseling Center said that although BMCC has always been a caring campus, there was something about the intentionality of this project that keeps the concept of caring constantly front of mind.

“You think about it twice when you’re interacting with students, such as using names, eye contact, those things we sometimes take for granted,” she said “There’s something about having a conversation about the intention behind our behavior that’s powerful.”

Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Strategic Planning Christopher Shults said as BMCC comes to the end of its two-year strategic planning process, one of the goals is the institutionalization of the culture of care.

“By making the culture of care an institutional goal that we hold ourselves accountable to, I see this work as potentially a way to operationalize and create the initiatives and activities that we can use to track the degree to which we are accomplishing our strategic plan,” said Shults.