Emmie's #RealCollege story

Emmie sharing her book

I've written more than once about my friend Emmie. There was the time she told me about how she was eating once a week until we started providing snacks (The Bowl). And more recently when we shared about how inspiration from Emmie keeps us going and about her newly published poem (find article here). And while Emmie is just one of the students we serve, and I know there are many more with equally large obstacles to success, I think it is important for leaders to have direct connection to student stories so we remember why we do what we do. At least I know it is true for me. So, this week I want to try something different. Emmie was nice enough to share some of her story on video this week. I took a very amateur effort at editing it, and I will let her tell her own story today. It's about 8 minutes of video and I think it's worth watching.

"So this has been a long time dream..." That's what I said to Emmie at the end of that segment. Poverty Informed practice requires us to remember that all of our students come to us with dreams, both big and small. They wouldn't have the courage to enter our doors if they didn't have a dream. It provokes anxiety for me when I think about it that way. It is such an act of trust and courage to bring us those dreams and to be open to dreams you may not even know you have yet. We are so privileged to be trusted with that responsibility and that privilege requires us to make every effort to reduce the barriers that could end those dreams. Reducing barriers and believing in dreams... sounds poverty informed to me.

Overcoming Resistance

I looked today, and this is the 17th article/essay (or whatever these are) trying to document our evolution towards Poverty Informed practice and the reasons behind that choice. In reviewing them, I realized I have been pretty rosy about our experience. And while this has been affirming and even life-changing on some levels, it has not been easy. So, in the interest of full disclosure, today I'd like to share where we find resistance, how we try to overcome it, and why we keep going. There are days when I feel like we are part of a movement and changing the world, and there are days where it seems getting people to do literally the least they can do is almost impossible. The reasons are simple and complex all at once.

Which word jumps out?

The first place I've noticed resistance is in processes and systems and the loyalty that develops to them. It defies logic in many ways, but as a colleague said "people will work very hard to do new things the old way." It's a pretty brilliant summary really. Back in July, I wrote about trying to change the language we used on signs, textbooks, test booklets (pictured with the big NOT), and in classrooms in my building. (here it is again) What I didn't tell you was that small change was met with agonizing resistance. The people who had created the stickers on tests came to me and said they would have to relabel all of them, and it was hundreds of booklets, and could we please wait until fall or just do it from now on... That was a hard one for me to hold my ground on, but it mattered. It seemed like literally the least we could do, and even then, I briefly caved and said we could just do new ones the new way and had to change my mind overnight. It seems silly in hindsight, but changing stickers and signs took months, when it could have taken hours. I would argue the people fighting it weren't even sure what their objection was, they were just loyal to the current system, and somehow had decided because it predated most of them, it was "right." There are lots of other examples, but when you try to change a paradigm, loyalty to processes and systems will be an issue. My best advice is having the courage of your conviction and stay the course.

Maybe it's a little redundant but in an organization our size, bureaucracy will also combat you. My writing generated enthusiasm on our campus and suddenly there was a rash of signs disappearing if they looked unfriendly (i.e. STAFF ONLY on locked doors).

In case being locked wasn't clear enough...

Now the game had started to go outside my sandbox, and pretty soon the physical plant weighed in. There are great people in our physical plant, but they weren't thrilled with random sign changes. I had a choice at that point, go to war, or look for a way to bring them in without losing momentum on campus. I'm a great compromise maker (which actually hasn't always served me well), and I was able to meet with the director and get my area declared an "experimental sign zone." I really have to give him credit for creativity on that one. We are heading towards remodeling, and he said we could look at sign options that gave us our poverty informed ethos and let us prepare for the best possible remodel. It was an elegant solution that let us change the bureaucratic structure slowly, but also let my enthusiastic team move with the urgency they felt. The only downside was some other areas had to put their signs back up, but we will get there. I think the lesson for overcoming resistance here is to pick the hills you are willing to die on. Sometimes a compromise can earn you an ally, and a battle makes you an unnecessary enemy. Pick your battles wisely.

The next area of resistance is less concrete, but it is everywhere. The constant evaluation of who is deserving of help is pervasive. I've written about it a number of times (including here), but it is worth revisiting. Dr. Donna Beegle is so eloquent at challenging all of us to find our underlying bias when she asks us to imagine what someone has to do to be worthy of your help. This form of resistance is more insidious and subtler. It comes up when people question the sustainability of The Bowl (our lobby snacks), or say things like "couldn't a business sponsor that?" It shows up when they tell me that our mantra "Every Barrier That Can Be Removed Should Be Removed," feels a little too much like "welfare." It shows up in seemingly well-intended conversations about why would you do this just for these students, shouldn't this be for everyone... That last one is particularly challenging because they are right in some sense. We believe that Poverty Informed practice is a form of Universal Design and solving the barriers for #RealCollege students solves things for students in general. But my history and sense of urgency says students in the crisis of poverty can't wait for the world to find universal solutions. For once, the students I'm advocating for get to lead the way, not wait for the rest of the world to be ready to help them. Can you see the subtle judgment within that other approach? So while it is better to fix systems than to fix people, we aren't asking the "people" to wait, at least within the best of our ability. Someday maybe the world will realize our students with the most barriers teach us everything, but until then we will plow the road for them the best we can. So, my advice to anyone working through this issue is twofold. First, give up on the notion of universal acceptance. This work will require upsetting people, and if you can't get comfortable with that, it will be hard. In all honesty, it's my biggest challenge... I like to be liked. Second, openly embrace what you are doing. Belief seems to attract belief and passion seems to attract passion. For everyone who has questioned snack purchases or lack of screening for assistance, there are two people telling me they love their job more than ever, and they feel like they understand our purpose.

I will leave with this. If you want to take on systems, processes, bureaucracy, and implicit bias, you better have reasons that keep you going. I admire the students we serve and personal connections with their stories keep me going. I'm pictured with my friend Emmie.

She shared a lot of her story with me last week on video, and I'll be sharing that soon (I'm not an expert editor, and she gets a chance to review), but I see her at school every day and realize she came back to college after years of homelessness and with barriers most of us would crumble under. But she embodies hope, and I think we owe her every effort to do whatever we can to shrink and remove barriers for her. Emmie is also a recently published poet, and I want to leave you with her poem "I AM." It's worth a reread on the days where the journey to real Poverty Informed practice seems too far. We can't stop. Emmie deserves our best effort.

Lessons from my Mom

My Mom's name was Dawn Simonson and Friday, November 9th would have been her 67th birthday. Unfortunately, she got lung cancer in 2012 and we lost her in the summer of 2016, so she isn't here to celebrate. But as I was pondering what I wanted to write this week about our evolution toward poverty informed practice, it made me think about her and the lessons she imparted, many of which she wasn't probably aware of. Like many parents her impact was more in what I observed, than what she told me, but we had spirited discussions as well. I was able to make a presentation Friday on Poverty Informed Practice and I closed by calling this my "life's work." Thinking about Mom over the last couple days has made that even clearer. Let me try to explain.


me (right) with my brother and Mom circa 1976



 

One of the basic tenets of our poverty informed approach is the fact that people bring their entire selves to the educational enterprise. That means they are complicated and lead rich full lives that may support or hinder their pursuit of their dreams. My mom was a very complex individual. She was a bride and mother at age 18 (2 kids and divorced by her early 20's, there we are to the right) who eventually worked her way through multiple college degrees to have a couple of high impact careers. She was a well-respected non-profit executive who struggled with addiction most of her adult life. She ran a side business counseling people convicted of domestic abuse after escaping a pretty nasty second marriage. Poverty informed practice requires a belief in people regardless of their background. When my parents divorced, we went from poor to really poor for a few years. It would have been easy to give up on my mom and write her off, but she wouldn't let that happen. Our version of poverty informed practice says we don't give up on people, and we don't require mom's heroism to get what you need. That last part drives some people nuts by the way... it is amazing how virtuous we require people in poverty to be to "deserve" help.

Graduation celebration

We also believe help must be normalized and de-stigmatized. I learned this from my mom too, but in a circuitous way. About the same time as the picture above of my Mom, brother, and me was taken, mom made the decision to go back to school. She was working at the non-profit she had helped found and would eventually become Senior VP at (after coming and going a couple times), but after dropping out of college to help my dad finish (he didn't that time, but that's another story), she knew her options would be limited without a college degree. So, she went back, in the 1970's, in a world that didn't really understand non-traditional, single moms, and certainly wasn't set up to accommodate them. My Mom was an original #RealCollege student I realize now as I type this. Anyway, she needed help and she got some. Although she continued to work, money was short, and I could draw you a picture of the food stamps we used for a year or so. To the day she died, Mom denied that we ever used government assistance to get by, even though I know what government cheese is and can distinctly remember the brightly colored stamps we took to the grocery store. That's the power of shame. One of the reasons we provide food for ANYONE in my department is I cannot abide the kind of shame that would cause my own mother to not remember the help that worked so well for us. She was a role model for how helping programs work, and the stigma wouldn't allow her to even remember that they did. Mom and her big brothers are pictured above on the day she got that Bachelor's degree that she worked so hard for, with help. I think I was 10.

Success is not required to be linear and in fact, we expect that it won't be. While Mom had great successes, I've alluded to the great troubles she had too. A couple of failed marriages that required starting over financially at least twice (although I'm not sure the first one required too much starting over, since she and dad had next to nothing anyway), struggles with alcoholism, and leading as a woman in an era where that was only beginning to be accepted were just a few of the things she dealt with. Later in life, she had one of her two sons struggling with a serious case of "failure to launch" (still feel bad about that), and at age 60 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. If she, or the world, had made a final reckoning of her worth at one of those low moments (or one of mine for that matter), who knows where the story ends. Instead, she just kept moving forward and eventually times got better. The picture below is one of her best moments, a family trip with her sons and their families to Disney World in 2012, shortly before her diagnosis. What if we approached our students

Disney World May 2012

with the assumption that we were the beginning of an upswing and when they struggle, we know that it is temporary? What if we acknowledged that sometimes people just need more to get back on track and that is not the same as "failure" or not "wanting it" bad enough. Someday I will write more about the resistance this little movement meets. The most common objection is "why would we treat students from poverty different than any other student?" My radical answer is that it is reparations for a lifetime of getting less than others, but my simplest answer is that we try to give people what they need. One of my heroes, Dr. Donna Beegle, recently shared that without poverty informed supports, the odds of success for a student in the crisis of poverty is 11%... Our principles say that we can't live with that, people get what they need within our ability to give it to them.

We had a service for my mom on July 12th, 2016. It was a remarkable day really and though losing a parent is never easy, it was amazing to hear from people for hours about the impact my complex, formidable, flawed, and imperfectly human mother had on their lives. I got to hear about how all those things that knocked her off track inspired her to make a difference. The non-profit she helped lead served individuals with developmental disabilities and that had come from watching a little girl get mistreated on the bus when Mom was just a kid. I also had conversations and got messages from so many women who said my mom was their mentor as a leader and tried to pave the way for them in ways she probably wasn't helped. And so many people came up and told me they knew my mom from the recovery community and how much she had meant to them. I knew Mom's recovery journey had certainly been neither linear nor smooth, so that one surprised me. And when I got up to give the eulogy, I said a line I had not planned. I said that part of Mom's legacy was the idea "that if you can help, you should, and in fact maybe you are required to." That sounds suspiciously close to our poverty informed mantra "Every Barrier That Can be Removed, Should Be Removed." And her commitment to mentoring feels like the relationship building we know is crucial to helping people move from poverty. So, when I say this is my life's work, I know where it came from. Thanks Mom and Happy Birthday.


Changing the Reflexive No

One of my favorite moments of this year was a phone call with Sara Goldrick-Rab a couple of months ago, and not just because of my excitement that she wanted to talk to me. I had reached out to her in January about starting an emergency fund on our campus that I wanted to model on her FAST Fund and wanted to use the name. She had graciously allowed it, but now we found that we hadn't quite done it the way it was intended, and our faculty union was also applying to start a fund that we hoped to merge with. I'm glad to say that we found solutions, but what I remember from my conversation with Sara was at one point she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't actually realize you were an administrator." (or something close to that) It made me laugh and felt like a compliment, but it also made me think. What was I not doing that made me seem less "administrative?" It made me think about what I have come to call the "reflexive no." Changing it has probably been the biggest personal change for me since our commitment to poverty informed practice.

This era of austerity tends to make many of us in higher education risk averse and even if you were an envelope pusher early in your career, it's hard not to get more careful as you get more veteran. That had certainly happened to me; I had defaulted to being "reasonable." In practice that meant that if you brought me an idea that was outside of the box I had developed, my instinct was to start with "probably not" instead of "why not" or "how." It was an insidious change because my position and veteran status gave me some status and an air of authority which made my reflexive skepticism seem wiser than it was. It also rewarded comfortable, policy and procedure-based thinking, which is not as person-centered as a poverty informed approach should be. All with the best of intentions, I had developed a reflexive "no" to new ideas and novel solutions. It seems very stereo-typically administrative. I'm not so reasonable anymore (our little movement) and let me tell you how I got there.

First, I was lucky to be surrounded by some excellent colleagues who believe (as my friend Cara Crowley from Amarillo says) that "no is the beginning of the conversation." I've talked about Tonya, our Project PROVEN guru, and Mandy, my associate dean, before but it's hard to explain how hard they have had to work to bring me back to my senses. They are the brave souls who got me to understand the irony of advocating for FAST type funds and then having a GED fund that required students to meet with me for approval. (read about it here). They also have a standing joke about the day I told them they could not bring me "anymore new ideas." I remember saying they couldn't hit me with new ideas first thing in the morning, but they are pretty sure it was a permanent ban, one they didn't follow by the way. Over time, I started to see that their tendency to say 'yes' and 'why not' led to really good results for students. In fact, my best "management" of either of them was to marshal resources to support their ideas and tendency to have a reflexive yes and not my reflexive reluctance.

So, with that experience I started to see things differently and that meant information was processed differently. Once I dropped the reflexive and "wise" initial no, I could see flaws in thinking more clearly and particularly in our lack of poverty informed practice. So many of our rules were based on this notion of "readiness" that doesn't seem valid through new eyes. To assume there is such a thing as being ready also assumes we have decided that there is a thing called college and we know exactly what it is and exactly what it takes to succeed there. It seems farcical to me through that lens. I work at an open admission institution in the division that is supposed to embody the promise of open access. If we define "readiness" as anything else than entering our doors, I think we are doing a disservice. One of our tenets of poverty informed practice is that we examine policies and procedures to find ways to support students, not punish and exclude them (credit to Dr. Donna Beegle). Dr. Beegle recently shared on social media that without poverty informed supports, a student in the crisis of poverty has roughly an 11% chance of succeeding. That is awful and requires us to default to yes when thinking of ways to support them and eliminate barriers. But, before I shifted to yes and why not, I did not have the courage of my convictions. In fact, last winter, I helped craft a student success document for our college and one of my statements was "every barrier that can be removed, should be removed." I predicted it would get pared out and it was... It seemed reasonable. Now that statement is the fundamental premise that guides our poverty informed work within my division. That's a shift and it's important. That statement has driven more change in my division in six months than in the prior 6 years.

I don't like stories about me, but I am a great example of the mind-shift needed to move toward poverty informed practice. 12 months ago, if you would have asked about me, people would have told you I was an advocate for students in poverty and really made them think. But, thinking was about all that happened. Defaulting to yes instead of a reflexive no changed everything. It made me see that our students with barriers teach us how to improve like other students never could. It made me realize that most barriers at the college are human constructs and therefore subject to change. I have become fond of saying just because a decision was made a long time ago, it doesn't mean it's any more valid or well thought out than one we could make today, so why not make the one that goes toward access and support? At the #RealCollege convening in September, Dr. DeRionne Pollard challenged us to show "raw courage" and be willing to experience "good trouble" on behalf of students. Defaulting to yes and losing the reflexive no seems like a good way to meet that challenge.