The Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) is launching an expansion of the Change Leadership Toolkit, with a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Change Leadership Toolkit (CLT) project, initially funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a guide and resource library that helps support institutions in leading systemic change in higher education. With this additional support from the Sloan Foundation, Pullias researchers will be offering a series of professional development webinars tailored specifically to campuses seeking equity-focused, systemic change, using the CLT as a foundation.

“We are excited to be working with Sloan to help them advance their equity projects in higher education and to make their campus leaders more efficacious in their change efforts,” noted Pullias Center Director Adrianna Kezar, who also serves as Primary Investigator on the project. “Sloan has been a leader in thinking about how to systemically create change and not just assume higher education administrators and faculty can just create change without any expertise or guidance.”

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. 

Susan Elrod, co-author of the Toolkit, added “This Toolkit provides leaders at any level with a practical step-by-step guide to create a change leadership plan that will result in systemic and sustainable change.” 

The “Building Capacity on Campuses” CLT expansion will offer interactive, team-based webinar series that will help leaders plan, refine and implement systemic change projects on their campuses. With the guidance of national experts on change and leadership in higher education, participating teams will be among the first to use the Change Leadership Toolkit, a research-based guidebook for leaders who are working to make meaningful, systemic changes at their institutions. Over a series of five webinars ranging from 60-90 minutes each, participants will learn about specific “Leader Moves’ they can make to enhance the effectiveness of their change project.

The Change Leadership Toolkit, released earlier this year, is a comprehensive guide created by Susan Elrod, Chancellor at Indiana University South Bend, and Pullias’ Kezar and postdoctoral scholar Ángel González.