By Sheryl MacPhee

Drawing on research and consultation with dozens of campuses across the country from 2020 to 2026, the new Shared Equity Leadership Start-Up Toolkit from the Pullias Center provides higher education leaders with a comprehensive guide for developing a shared institutional commitment to equity. The Toolkit helps institutions broaden participation in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work, navigate potential opposition, and embed equity-mindedness into campus roles, policies, processes and structures.

Its impact lies in helping colleges and universities move beyond siloed or symbolic DEI efforts toward sustained cultural change and collective accountability for achieving equity goals — a must in the current challenging higher education environment.

Shared Equity Leadership (SEL) is a collaborative approach in which responsibility for advancing DEI is shared broadly across an institution rather than assigned to a single office or leader. The model creates a critical mass of faculty, staff and administrators who collectively guide equity work and receive institutional support. By distributing leadership across campus, SEL recognizes that meaningful change requires the knowledge, influence and commitment of people working in many different schools and departments and at multiple levels.

The Start-Up Toolkit is just that—a useful and engaging set of proven tools that are essential to beginning the SEL process on your campus. Within the Toolkit, there are four concrete phases:

• Laying the Foundation shares how your campus can assess readiness and identify and engage your SEL team;
• Landscape Analysis explores how to evaluate your campus goals and context and map your campus equity networks;
• Chart the Course and Plan for Growth builds a shared understanding of how to proceed with SEL on your campus by creating shared vision, language and goals, and building capacity; and
• Activate Change imparts how you and your team will embed SEL into various campus roles, policies and practices, monitor progress and measure success.

Implementing a collaborative leadership model can be challenging in higher education, where decision-making has traditionally been hierarchical. Campus leaders may be unsure how to involve more people, determine who should participate, build support for the approach, or respond to resistance within and beyond their institutions. The SEL Start-Up Toolkit addresses these questions with practical tools, worksheets, activities and resources designed specifically to engage team members and to begin making systemic change.  

Building on new data as well as earlier resources created by researchers from the Pullias Center and the American Council on Education (including more than 15 reports, toolkits and reflective guides) the new Shared Equity Leadership Start-Up Toolkit offers institutions a structured path from intention to action. Through collective leadership, aligned values, and sustained practice, SEL — and the new Start-Up Toolkit — can help colleges and universities reshape their cultures and make lasting progress toward more equitable outcomes.