By Andrea Venezia on behalf of the Coordination Hub
NSF’s Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Coordination Hub (the Coordination Hub) is thrilled to announce that it will be supporting the INCLUDES National Network (National Network) for another five-year cycle! We envision the National Network as a go-to entity for people across the country to learn about strategies, practices, and models to create equitable opportunities in STEM fields. The National Network is focused on changing systems that hold inequities in place to broaden participation in STEM.
The National Network will leverage the foundation built since the inception of NSF’s Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Initiative (INCLUDES) and will remain accessible to anyone who wishes to join. Refinements in the vision and related strategies are aimed toward 1) focusing on supporting projects’ impact and 2) sharing and learning from collective wisdom, experiences, voices, and data to demonstrate the National Network’s impact. To do that, the Coordination Hub will provide focused capacity building supports around data, information, and research; engagement, learning, and community building; and storytelling and related communications. The National Network will be organized in clusters, reflecting the level of projects’ engagement with equity-driven systems change at scale. Each cluster will receive tailored information and capacity building supports.
To intensify the Coordination Hub’s support of National Network members in transforming the STEM ecosystem, we are creating an Incubator, akin to a lab. Within the Incubator, National Network members from large INCLUDES-funded projects, such as the Alliances and Collaborative Change Consortia, will experiment with problems of practice together – to share strategies and information about opportunities and barriers and enable collective action. The Coordination Hub will document learnings to share throughout the National Network across all the clusters and will organize Shared Measures around an action-focused framework. The Coordination Hub’s actions will be guided by Liberatory Design. In the coming months, the Coordination Hub will be setting up new systems, including advisory groups focused on supporting action in three domains: education, policy, and industry. If you are interested in learning more about the advisory group opportunity, please email the Coordination Hub at nsfincludeshub@sri.com.
This new vision responds to feedback and evaluation findings from across the National Network. Calls for maintaining an open access Network and online community, working strategically with industry and policy stakeholders, and applying equity-driven principles to all aspects of the Coordination Hub and it services to the National Network are among the feedback we heard and integrated into action plans for the next five years together.
As we move from the foundational vision to vision 2.0, we wish to extend our gratitude to the Education Development Center (EDC). With collaboration from Coordination Hub partners, the EDC team led the development and implementation of a network engagement and capacity building strategy that created numerous opportunities for National Network members to share ideas and practices, foster deep relationships, and disseminate tangible knowledge. In the coming weeks, we will share more about the Coordination Hub’s new partners and their roles.
As we share these updates, we will also reflect on lessons from NSF’s 2023 Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES National Network held in August. Requests for links to the Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson’s Fireside Chat with Dr. Tori Rhoulac Smith and the Student Voices Panel with Dr. Erin Lynch has been strong in the weeks since the Convening. We are pleased to share those here, for the INCLUDES community to reflect on the Chairwoman’s legacy and students’ experiences navigating in STEM fields. Both discussions highlight why we all engage in this work and the urgency with which we must proceed to broaden participation in STEM.