A Big Thanks to Our Institutional Partners

Our creative community is composed of individuals, organizations, and institutions collaborating to make higher education a stronger industry. Together, we generate reciprocal outcomes through dialog and the generation of new ideas and ways to understand the often hidden fabric of our institutions. 

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There are several nonprofit organizations offering support and guidance that I’d like to call out and thank:

• The Society for College and University Planning

• The Renaissance Center

• The Association for Managers of Innovation

• National Center for Science and Civic Engagement

• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

 

So far, our institutional partners include:

• State University of New York at New Paltz

• Claremont Lincoln University (part of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

• Southern Oregon University

• Humboldt CalPoly

• Large, private, East Coast R1

• Central US State University

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Canvas Magic

Much of the work last fall focused on building our creative community, recruiting institutional partners, and developing the methodologies to produce ecosystem depictions. It all went remarkably well. At the heart of the process is a series of canvases that we employ over the course of three online sessions. These canvases contain the theory and details we use to build the ecosystem depictions and they are each essentially landing pads for a thousand virtual stickie notes. We are still refining the details and will make these available to our creative community and partners well ahead of the publishing of the book. Here is a quick preview of the nine canvases:

• Session One Canvases

  • Ecosystem Landscape, Boundaries, and Inhabitants

  • Ecosystem Orchestrators and Activities

  • The Inhabitant Experience

• Session Two Canvases

  • Ecosystem Review and Enhancement

  • Ecosystem Value Dynamics

  • Future States

• Session Three Canvases

  • Future Horizons

  • Ecosystem Shifts and Interventions

  • Key Orchestrator Capacities

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First Ecosystem Project Nearly Complete

We have partnered with the SUNY New Paltz School of Business to explore and model a fascinating ecosystem in the seven-county area in the lower and mid Hudson Valley. The work is nearly complete and we’re now writing the first full chapter of the book. It will be a few weeks before we have a sharpened draft, and we plan to share this preview with the entire creative community as it nears completion. We learned a lot during the

process and achieved impactful insights in a short amount of time. 

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Upcoming Ecosystem Design Team Projects

Our target is somewhere between 12 and 20 ecosystem depictions and accompanying narratives by the time we publish the book in mid-2025. Each of these will be a chapter of about 10 pages or so. Most of these will be based on case studies in collaboration with institutional partners. Here is an incomplete list of emerging partner projects:

• learner integration in social, academic, and professional dynamics

• curricular and program innovation and program portfolio management

• physical and emotional safety

• learning to learn from the new student to self-directed to life-long learning

• social, cohort, and peer-to-peer learning dynamics

There are a few, however, that will be amalgams, ecosystems designed by teams of experts who have knowledge and experience across many institutions over time. Here are some examples of amalgam projects currently underway:

• Institutional Cognition and Consciousness

• Knowledge Workforce Ecology

• Experiential learning, Internships, Co-ops, and Clinical Education

If you see something that interests you or would like to partner with The Ecosystem Project, please reach out to me, and let’s talk!