New Support form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help CLT team as they work with select campuses to implement systemic change and develop training webinars

The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) has received an additional $600,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to enhance and further expand the Change Leadership Toolkit (CLT) for advancing systemic change in higher education.

This new round of funding will focus on the expansion and enhancement of the Toolkit content and engagement with users in higher education. Principal Investigator Adrianna Kezar and her team, which includes Co-PI Susan Elrod and Elizabeth Holcombe, will work with selected higher education campus teams as they utilize the new resources for two years to obtain feedback and better understanding usage of the toolkit during implementation. In addition, the project includes development of asynchronous, interactive webinars as well as enhancing and expanding the Toolkit itself.

The continued work will provide a research-informed foundation upon which higher education leaders can implement systemic, equity-focused change to best support the needs of all postsecondary education students. 

"We have heard from hundreds of leaders using the CLT to forward campus changes within departments, schools as well as overall institutional changes,” noted Kezar. “They all note how helpful the guide is in helping them strategically map a course to change, utilize levers to accelerate innovations, and to anticipate barriers.”

The Change Leadership Toolkit 2.0 was released earlier this year and serves as an updated guide that incorporates lessons learned by institutions as they’ve used the guide to implement equity-focused, systemic change.  

The Change Leadership Toolkit is a comprehensive guide created by Susan Elrod, Chancellor at Indiana University South Bend, and Pullias’ Kezar and postdoctoral scholar Ángel González. The project began in 2019 with an initial grant from the National Science Foundation and has continued to expand and grow with subsequent funding, an earlier Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.