Content Overview

• THE Collaborative for Wellbeing Experience
• An Intentional and Systematic Approach to Change
• Support for Participating Institutions
  • The Hub
  • Funding
  • Enrollment Support
  • Learning Sessions
  • Action Periods
  • Learning Congress
• Community Commitments

THE Collaborative for Wellbeing Experience

While 22 months is much too short to see large-scale improvement on wellbeing and mental health outcomes, THE Collaborative for Wellbeing will lay the foundation for institutions to achieve long-term impact toward all students thriving and flourishing.

THE Collaborative for Wellbeing will provide institutions with intensive support to systemically pursue answers to strategic learning questions such as:

• What does thriving look and feel like to students?
• What groups of students experience wellbeing disparities?
• What enables students to thrive?
• What prevents students from thriving?
• In what ways are threats to thriving impacting learning, degree attainment, and workforce readiness?
• What would “better” look and feel like to students, faculty, and staff?
• What norms, structures, and processes at your institution need to change to enable more students to thrive?
• What does your team need to learn about implementation of these change ideas in order to maximize impact?
• How do answers to these questions vary across different groups of students?

An Intentional and Systematic Approach to Change

ANEW’s Guided Changemaking Pathways for Better Outcomes serve as the cornerstone of our collaborative journey. Embracing an “all teach, all learn, all lead” philosophy, Collaborative activities and milestones facilitate learning and improvement through action, while working together with a community of Texas institutions on the same journey.

With the supports of THE Collaborative for Wellbeing, by June 2026, participating institutions can expect to:

• Deepen collaboration across campus and with students with lived experience
• Administer and use the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) at least twice per semester
• Build an understanding of the norms, processes, and structures that perpetuate disparities in wellbeing and mental health for a specific group of students
• Define and advance 2-5 specific concrete change projects and generate learnings to inform scale and spread
• Develop an intentional, holistic, and systematic measurement approach to inspire and drive large-scale impact
• Create a path forward to voluntarily continue the work upon the conclusion of the 2024-2026 cohort. Institutions that make sufficient progress on the Changemaking Pathways milestones will be invited to join the National Pacesetters Action Community (PAC), an ongoing community of pioneering institutions that routinely administer WISHES and are relentlessly focused on achieving better outcomes at scale

Support for Participating Institutions

THE Collaborative for Wellbeing includes structured and sequenced activities and supports for institutions to learn from Collaborative facilitators and from each other.

The Hub

The Hub is a collective of improvement, measurement, wellbeing, mental health, and higher education subject matter experts and operational support functions. The Hub facilitates shared learning, collaborative action, and leadership through training, data support, coaching, experiential learning opportunities, and community. Learn more about the Hub Team.

Funding

Institutions may receive up to $5,000 for their active participation in and contributions to THE Collaborative for Wellbeing community activities, submission of their brief monthly reflections, and good faith progress on the Collaborative Pathways milestones. Additionally, funding for hotel and transportation will be available for up to 5 team members to attend the in-person Learning Sessions.

Enrollment Support

The application process is detailed here. Completing the application will require active engagement and conversations with partners across your institution. Several key decisions need to be made in Summer 2024, including selecting your Core Team members, setting priorities, and committing to use the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES). If your institution is considering applying, we strongly encourage you to start the process as early as possible. Your institution will not be able to complete all aspects of the application if you wait until the last minute. Collaborative Facilitators are here to help. Prospective institutions have access to an informational webinar about THE Collaborative for Wellbeing and guidance on building your Core Team and selecting your population of focus. The Hub is also available to answer individualized questions about the application and Collaborative. Questions? Email thecollaborativeforwellbeing@nyu.edu

Learning Sessions

THE Collaborative for Wellbeing will convene for three Learning Sessions: in January 2025 (virtual), June 2025 (in-person), and January 2026 (in-person). We strongly encourage the participation of the entire Core Team at all Learning Sessions; funding for hotel and transportation will be available for up to 5 team members. Learning Sessions are highly interactive and disrupt traditional conference or think tank paradigms and instead embrace a unique collection of values, methods, and intentional activities to:

• foster authentic and meaningful connection, break down silos, and leverage the strengths of participants
• build capacity for using improvement science, human-centered design, and innovation methods to guide impactful change
• inspire and incubate ideas for change that can be quickly tested during Actions Period, shared, and spread
• co-produce shared learnings and refine our theory of improvement and work plans

Action Periods

Action Periods reflect the time between Learning Sessions–when the actual work of improvement and innovation gets done! Outlined below are various supports available to help your Core Team apply the Changemaking Pathways to your campus efforts. It’s important for all Core Team members to actively participate in all community-wide activities.

Monthly Community Calls address common challenges, spotlight teams’ successes and innovations, introduce new concepts and tools, and build relationships across institutions. All Core Team members are expected to participate in collaborative-wide monthly calls.

Teams will have the opportunity to be paired with another participating institution for monthly peer coaching, facilitated by a Collaborative coach. Teams will also have the ability to access their coach for 1:1 coaching, and coaches will provide feedback to teams on their monthly reports and assignments, if warranted.

In addition to Monthly Community Calls, there are optional ad hoc hands-on trainings focused on skill-building for particular Core Function Leads (e.g., data visualization for Measurement Leads).

Support at a leadership level is critical to the success of any endeavor that aims to achieve large-scale impact. To that end, periodic calls will be dedicated to AVPs or equivalent positions.

Institutions are expected to submit a brief monthly reflection about their team’s progress, learnings, successes, and challenges over the past month. The monthly reports are an essential part of the Collaborative experience so that the Hub team can be responsive to the real-time challenges and successes of participating teams, facilitate problem-solving, and accelerate learning and improvement across participating colleges and universities. The content of the Monthly Community Calls, coaching, adhoc trainings, and other Collaborative support offerings are informed by teams’ monthly reports.

Teams will administer WISHES at least twice per semester. This instrument provides a shared measurement approach across the Collaborative and provides close to real-time, actionable data for institutions to use to inform their work. Collaborative supports include reviewing considerations for developing a survey administration strategy, data analysis, interpretation of the data, generating insights, and using the data to motivate partners and inspire action. Institutions will have opportunities for peer sharing based on their experiences and lessons learned administering WISHES.

Learning Congress

At the end of the Collaborative, a virtual celebratory and harvesting session will be held in which accomplishments are celebrated and results and learnings are shared and reviewed.