Presidents & Trustees Collaborative

Unlock the Potential of Board Leadership for Student Success

The Presidents & Trustees Collaborative: Community College Leadership Development is an initiative designed to strengthen the capacity of dozens 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 the 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, and other priorities unrelated to student outcomes.

Program Highlights

Through a year-long series of sessions, presidents and trustees are guided through Aspen’s Trustee Framework and learn lessons from Aspen Prize-winning colleges—all with the ultimate goal of strengthening their capacity to align decision-making with their colleges' student-success reform priorities. The program includes:

• One in-person session that sets the stage for the work, including structured sessions for teams of presidents and board members to agree on reasons for reform, consider reform priorities, learn about the practices of exemplary community college boards, and plan goals for the remainder of the engagement.
• Two virtual sessions to sustain momentum in defining/refining prioritized metrics, considering potential changes to board meetings and other deliberations, and identifying possible actions to strengthen the board-president relationship.
• Tailored curricular activities and self-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 Presidents & Trustees Collaborative provides:

• Collaborative Development: All activities will focus on presidents and trustees working together to advance student-focused reforms.
• Sustainable Impact: The program is designed to help participants establish 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 Excellent Outcomes: 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 exemplary community college leadership practices.
• 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: Documented changes in board/president actions, reflected in artifacts such as updated student success metrics, revised board committee structures, revised 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 colleges 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 partner (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 Aspen board curriculum and self-assessment tools for use during and after the grant period. State partners must have the capacity to lead participant correspondence, event logistics, and sustainability planning in partnership with Aspen, and will also receive a modest pass-through grant to help organize events and support project outcomes.
• 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.