A Purpose and A Plan

On March 24, 2023, more than two hundred people around Greater Boston spent the morning together in a hotel ballroom at Assembly Row in Somerville. They came from all walks of life and represented a vast diversity of experience, expertise, and education. They were educators, administrators, organizers, managers, workers, students, and neighbors. And they all came to talk about the future of Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC). 

They had gathered for BHCC’s Strategic Planning Community Convening, a critical step in the College’s strategic planning process. All of the state’s 15 community colleges are required to produce a strategic plan every five years, and BHCC’s most recent one expires at the end of 2023. 

Strategic planning is one of those terms that ordinarily exists in the rarified world of consultants—a soft sinecure in the gauzy world of ideas rather than the immediate and urgent work of figuring out the future of the Commonwealth’s largest community college. But this meeting was no sleepy colloquy, and those in attendance along with the organizers were determined that the College’s strategic plan would not be written only to molder on a shelf, a dead letter. 

What those 2019 strategic planners could not have known was the monumental challenge represented by an unprecedented global pandemic, the repercussions of which higher education, government, industry, and individuals everywhere, are still trying to fully understand. But even as the virulence of the virus fades, hopefully for good, it will change how BHCC serves its students and their communities perhaps for years to come. All that made March’s community convening even more important. 

The changes of the last five years went beyond the pandemic. However, the demographic trends that have sent enrollment declining at colleges, particularly in the Northeast, have continued apace. The ever-increasing cost of living in Greater Boston has accelerated, leaving a wider than ever wealth gap, while, promisingly, the public policy climate around support for community colleges across the country has shifted. Several states introduced free community college programs either targeted at specific groups or as a universal benefit—with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, the latest state leader to endorse such a plan in the form of the proposed MassReconnect program. 

And don’t forget the Vision Project, the College’s proposal to seek out a public-private partnership to build an entirely new facility on the Charlestown campus, and is in the process of erecting its first new building, the Student Success Center, in a decade.

So when the hundreds of participants from more than 50 participating organizations and institutions gathered in that Somerville hotel in March, they had their work cut out for them: to offer the information and insight that would inform a broad environmental scan and analysis, which in turn would set the direction for the next five years at Bunker Hill Community College.

The March 24 Community Convening was only part of the process of producing BHCC’s next strategic plan. That larger process is coordinated by the College’s Dean of Academic Affairs for Research, Assessment and Planning Arlene Vallie, who, along with her team, collects a vast array of data from across the institution.

“Strategic planning is larger than any one event or report,” Vallie said. “It is really a process of discovery and analysis, and everyone at the College and in the communities that we serve has a role to play in it.”

BHCC uses the Institutional Capacity Framework and Assessment Tool (ICAT), a rubric created by Achieving the Dream, a national advocacy organization that champions community college transformation, to guide the conversations around creating its strategic plan. ICAT is a comprehensive approach to addressing the emerging needs of community colleges to improve results for all students, especially low-income students and students of color. It is built on seven essential capacities for colleges to create the student-focused culture that promotes student success: leadership and vision, data and technology, equity, teaching and learning, engagement and communication, strategy and planning, and policies and practices.

Since the fall of 2022, a steering committee staffed by members of the BHCC community from across the College has been preparing the ICAT assessment and conducting an environmental scan to provide a broad gathering of data from both within and outside of the College. The March 24 Community Convening was part of that environmental scan, soliciting observations, feedback and ideas from the wider community.

“Our work flows directly from our strategic plan, and our strategic plan would not exist without you,” BHCC President Pam Eddinger told the crowd that morning. “This convening makes the strategic plan more than a once-every-five-year performance.  Strategic thinking every day is a habit of mind for all of us at the College.”

Indeed, to read the College’s last strategic plan, which spans from 2019 to 2023, is to be immersed in both evaluation and analysis, a rigorous exercise in goal setting and institutional self-study that is part report card, part white paper, distilled into a dense fifteen pages.

The data gathered from that event and the committee’s work will next be analyzed and synthesized into a draft report later this year, which the College and its wider community of partners (including state agencies such as the Department of Higher Education) will have the opportunity to review and provide feedback. The finalized 2024-29 Strategic Plan is scheduled to be published in early 2024.

“The goal of the strategic planning process is really broad engagement with internal and external stakeholders,” said BHCC Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost James Canniff. “Grounding that engagement in student success and experience outcomes like access, retention, persistence, completion and belonging, and then aligning our plan with our operational benchmarks—that’s the path to an impactful and effective strategic plan.”

At the center of the March 24 Community Convening was the World Café, a widely used model for conversation, research, and planning. It was developed in the mid-1990s by academic and business leaders for facilitating constructive and inclusive discussions in large groups. A World Café places participants in small groups at tables where engagement over specific generative questions can happen in an informal setting. Then, the participants may switch tables (or, as in the case of the March 24 World Café, facilitators and note-takers switched tables) to continue discussing different topics. This intensive but discrete set of tabletop engagements and conversations create what the World Café's inventors called “the experience of collective intelligence that transform[s] the depth, scope, and quality of...collaboration.”

The March 24 World Café asked participants to consider four key questions, with responses as diverse and varied as those who participated. But a common theme coursed through all of the conversations of the day: the needs that Bunker Hill Community College seeks to address, from breaking down barriers to higher education access and student success to working with industry partners to respond to the workforce needs of the region to affordability not only of education but of living in Greater Boston, are as pressing as ever. 

The tables of the World Café were divided into sections, each structuring their conversations around four questions. Each table had a designated facilitator and note-taker, and the content of the discussions will be incorporated into the larger environmental scan of the Strategic Planning Committee and later into the committee’s reporting and the 2024-29 Strategic Plan itself. While the contents of the World Café's discussions will be more fully explored in that published strategic plan, here is just a small sample of some of the topics of conversation.

What skills and credentials do our students need to thrive as invaluable members of Boston’s diverse workforce? How can BHCC adapt to these changing needs and trends?

Community colleges have long forged close partnerships with industry and employers in their regions, but that role has grown over the last decade. At BHCC, even as enrollment in credit-bearing courses, degree programs, and certificates has been essentially flat, the growth in non-credit credentials, mainly in those targeted at training for specific roles or industries, has grown exponentially. Last year, BHCC enrolled almost 6,000 students in Workforce Development programs—up from less than a thousand just five years ago.

What opportunities can BHCC create or leverage to reduce barriers to access and completion?

Ensuring that anyone who wants to go to college can do so and that anyone attending college receives the support they need to graduate and meet their educational goals is at the heart of the Community College Movement and BHCC’s institutional identity. The College’s work with Achieving the Dream, its status as both an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) and a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), and its establishment of the TRIO, LifeMap, and Student Central hubs within the College have all been with this goal in mind.  

What collaborations can BHCC pursue to better address the most pressing needs of Boston’s diverse communities?

The more than 52 partners who attended the March 24 Community Convening and World Café are a testament to the importance of collaboration in the College’s work. As many participants observed, those collaborations are often most fruitful when two partners bring complementary skill sets and resources to the table, such as when the College has partnered with employers to offer workforce development programs or with school systems around Early College. 

How can BHCC’s Vision Project contribute to Greater Boston’s education and workforce landscape while ensuring that the benefits of this development are shared equitably among all community members?

The Vision Project (see sidebar) is a long-term reimagining of the BHCC campus that will support the next generation of community college learners. Although it is still in the earliest stages of planning and exploration, sharing ideas and soliciting feedback from the communities the College serves has been a high priority. While the Vision Project, which is undertaken in collaboration with the College’s partners throughout state government, seeks a public-private partnership to realize the creation of a new college facility and transformation of the Charlestown Campus, there is still ample room for community input on how a renewed BHCC campus could serve and interact with students, partners, and the public. 

 Strategic plans are, by necessity, living documents—the events of the last few years could never have been foreseen at the 2019 World Café, and so, while we hope for calmer, more predictable times, we know that just as we did in March of 2020, the College will be called upon to adapt and change in ways we cannot imagine today. That reality only underscores the importance of these strategic planning exercises as moments to come together, to evaluate, to ideate, to question everything, and rededicate ourselves to those values of equality of college access and success that are at the core of Bunker Hill Community College.