Co-Creating the Future
The challenge with many strategic plans is ensuring that the desired goals and outcomes are actually achieved and assessed. The Office of Cultivate Well-Being Action & Transformation was established to ensure that there is a team who wakes up and comes to work each day with a singular focus: assisting all cabinet areas and colleges with effectively delivering and implementing the Cultivate Well-Being Roadmaps – for students and for faculty and staff. They serve as coordinators, catalysts, facilitators, and problem-solvers. They help amplify and augment existing strengths and skillsets of divisions and departments or fill gaps in capacity during temporary transitions to ensure our collaborative efforts are successful.
“Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions that advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change. — Kania, Williams, Schmitz, Brady, Kramer & Splansky Juster, “Centering Equity in Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2022.”
Using a Collective Impact Approach, our office advances the cross-Institute communication, alignment, and collaboration required to achieve large-scale, collective, place-based change to enhance well-being.
Core Functions of the Backbone in Collective Impact
Ensure the effort’s focus on equity and inclusion
Guide Vision and Strategy
Advance Policy
Mobilize Resources
Build Community Engagement
Support Aligned Activities
Establish Shared Measurement
The collective impact process includes multiple levels of stakeholder engagement:
The Champions and Executive Sponsors serve on the President’s Cabinet or in other positions of influence to ensure integration with the Institute Strategic Plan and to designate resources.
The Advisory Boards are composed of multi-disciplinary leaders, decision-makers, and members of the GT community who provide strategic direction, champion the effort, and align their own unit’s work to the common agenda.
Faculty, staff and student input and collaboration are engaged in multiple ways throughout the process and outcomes will be shared in digital reports, social media and presentations.
The collective impact process is also informed by our setting in Atlanta, in collaboration with the University System of Georgia, alumni and families. Similarly, our successes will have a positive impact on the well-being of those with whom we work, play, live, learn and love, as well as honor our interdependence as people, place and planet.
Heather Zesiger, PhD, MPH, MCHES®
Director, Cultivate Well-Being Action and Transformation
heather.zesiger@gatech.edu
Malcolm Robinson, MA
Senior Project Support Specialist
malcolm.robinson@gatech.edu