Board Forward Collaborative

Unlock the Potential of Board Leadership for Student Success

The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program is excited to announce the launch of the Board Forward Collaborative: Leadership Development for Community College Presidents & Trustees, an initiative designed to strengthen the capacity of community college presidents and their boards of trustees to sustain systemic reforms that improve student outcomes. This project is made possible by support from Ascendium Education Group.

Why This Matters

Aspen’s research into community college excellence reveals that long-term, scaled change depends on college presidents and trustees having a shared understanding of why student-outcome reforms are needed, agreeing on prioritized reform strategies, and aligning their review of metrics, policies, and budgets to those priorities. With that foundation in place, institutional decisions and strategies can transcend leadership cycles and create enduring structures to support student completion and post-completion success. Without it, needed reforms are more likely to be disrupted by other factors: presidential turnover, budgetary uncertainty, political division. For this reason, Aspen is intensifying its work with community college boards and presidents.

Program Highlights

Through a year-long series of sessions, participants will engage with Aspen’s Trustee Framework and lessons from Aspen Prize-winning colleges to build the capacity of community college boards and presidents to align decision-making with student-success reform priorities.

• One in-person session that sets the stage for the work, including structured sessions for teams of presidents and board members to define reasons for reform and consider reform priorities, learn about the practices of exemplary community college boards, and plan work for the remainder of the engagement.
• Two virtual sessions to sustain momentum in defining/refining prioritized metrics, consider potential changes to board meetings and other deliberations, and identify possible actions to strengthen the board-president relationship.
• Tailored curricular activities and assessment tools developed by Aspen to help boards and presidents identify priorities for strengthening governance in light of their self-defined goals for advancing student success as well as other contextual factors.  

What Makes This Program Unique?

The Board Forward Collaborative provides:

• Collaborative Development: All activities will focus on presidents and trustees working together to advance student-focused reforms—rather than trustee development in isolation.
• Sustainable Impact: The program is designed to create governance practices that support student success efforts over the long term, lasting even as sitting board members’ terms end and new ones are onboarded.
• Alignment with Excellence: While sessions are designed to enable each team to define its own priorities and next steps, all sessions are grounded in Aspen’s frameworks for student success and to advance the conditions for long-term, systemic change that improve student outcomes.
• Sustainability: State partners will develop plans to sustain board and president professional development offerings after the grant period ends.

Who Should Apply?

There are two pathways for engagement:

Aspen Fellowship Alumni

The program is available to presidents who have completed one of the fellowships provided by the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program: the Rising Presidents Fellowship, New Presidents Fellowship, or Presidents Fellowship.

• Participants: Each alumni cohort will include 12-13 presidents, their board chair, and one or more additional trustees. All participants from these 12-13 institutions will work together in large and small group settings.
• Focus: Make concrete changes that strengthen president-board alignment and foster sustained student-outcomes-oriented reforms across the community college.
• Deliverables: Artifacts documenting changes in board/president actions, such as updated student success metrics, revised board committee structures, updated presidential evaluations, or new terms of engagement between presidents and trustees.

State Backbone Organizations

The program will also be available to trustee/president teams from community college teams in two states.  To start, Aspen will select statewide organizations committed to deepening president-board alignment around student success as part of their state-wide community college strategy.

• State partner: Each state chosen will have a state backbone entity (e.g., state system office, student success center, state association, university with a community college program focus) to guide the selection of colleges and coordinate session logistics. The state entity will receive access to the entire Aspen board curriculum and assessments for use during and after the grant period. States will also receive a pass-through grant to help organize events and support project outcomes, so applicants must have the capacity to lead participant correspondence, event logistics, and sustainability planning in partnership with Aspen. 
• Participants: State partners help select participants consisting of presidents, board chairs, and one or more trustees from each of 10-15 community colleges in the state. 
• Focus: Strengthen board/president leadership at a substantial number of community colleges in the state while, at the same time, building state-level capacity for sustained board leadership development.
• Deliverables:
  • Artifacts documenting changes in board/president actions, such as updated student success metrics, revised board committee structures, updated presidential evaluations, or new formal terms of engagement between presidents and trustees.
  • State sustainability plans that outline strategies for continuing board professional development.

Key Criteria

• A commitment to systemic reforms that advance student student success.
• Presidents and trustees are prepared to consider changes that strengthen their collective capacity to advance student success.
• For state partners, a commitment to sustaining president-board development beyond the Aspen-supported cohort, with an ongoing cost-free license to use the Aspen board curriculum.