C2C

At Ryerson a group of student service staff have created a group we call Connections to Campus or C2C. A better name might be Connections to Colleagues though. I'll explain.

Somewhere between 15-20 full-time staff from nine student service units came together in May 2007, at our Director's urging, to find ways to "create a more vibrant campus community." We started with a full day facilitated discussion. We celebrated some of our achievements, identified some of our challenges and started to develop an action plan for moving forward together.

In our first several gatherings over six months or so we talked a lot to help us understand our purpose. Our first project, with a tangible outcome, was to support our school's community food room drive in late November. We agreed that it would be best for us to support existing initiatives rather than build something new that may (unknowingly) compete with something else in our community.

Meeting attendance in our first year was spotty at times, but in time members grew more committed and we now regularly have 12 or more people show up for our monthly 1.5 hour meetings. It is important to note that participation in the group is not mandatory.

Making progress on other projects likely helped members understand C2C's purpose and the role each member could play. For instance, we identified communication of our events, programs and services as an area requiring attention early on and it lead to the creation of our Student Life Promotions Team which now consists of six student staff that manage the content on our Student Life website.

We recently held another all day meeting to help us take stock of our progress and map out a plan for our future activities. It was interesting to note that about 75% of those in attendance were not around when C2C started nearly three years earlier.

As one of founding members of the group who has taken a leadership role in moving our agenda forward it is gratifying to see the progress we have made and the ways members have come together. The units making up our group has expanded a little as we understand others who have similar community development goals. One such group has been Alumni Relations. We have three of our five faculties represented and it would be great to see all of our faculties represented in time.

One need our group seems to be meeting is breaking down the hierarchy or "silos" so commonly found in a large organization (ie bureaucracy). All members certainly report up through the hierarchy and for the most part we report to the Vice-Provost, Students, but C2C provides an opportunity for members to work "horizontally" rather than in the more traditional "vertical" methods. Reaching across to colleagues, rather then up to management, and engaging in regular dialogue and partnering on projects raises awareness of what others are doing to create community and gives members a chance to find ways to fill in the gaps.

We identified three areas that need attention in our recent full-day meeting, as follows: (1) how we share information, (2) how we collaborate and (3) how we define success. We have had discussions about these topics in the past (and will likely continue to have them for some time into the future), but it was neat to see all of us identify the issues and determine an action plan collectively.

In my experience I'm not familiar with a similar group being used at other schools. I would be very interested in having C2C members share their thoughts on our group, hear what others outside of Ryerson think about our approach and find ways other schools use to promote student service staff to work collaboratively to "create a more vibrant campus community."