Registration for the October 12-14 Workshop will be opening soon.

2023 HEDS Workshop on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Student Success

We invite teams from HEDS member institutions to join us for a workshop designed to advance their efforts to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success on their campuses.

On October 12-14, 2023, HEDS will host a 3-day workshop at Wabash College for 10-15 institutional teams designed to give you focused time, space, and support to reflect on diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success at your institution. The product of the workshop will be a plan that summarizes the current landscape for these efforts at your institution and details next steps for your work. Your team can share this plan with institutional leaders and others at your institution to garner support and use it to guide your work going forward.

A Guided Retreat

We design our workshops to serve as a time and space for people to step back from the hectic pace of everyday work and reflect on, think about, and plan next steps in the company of supportive colleagues. We will provide a project planning template that we’ve developed based on years of experience on student success projects at colleges and universities across the country. The workshop will be staffed by facilitators who will provide support and guidance throughout the workshop, working directly with teams to help them develop and sharpen their plans. We’ll also create opportunities for teams to share their plans and get feedback from one another. Finally, because this is a HEDS workshop and we have an ongoing connection with your institution, we will follow up with your teams after the workshop to provide any support we can as you implement, troubleshoot, and revise your plans.

A Customized Plan

The most important step in improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success is to understand how to structure and customize best practices to the unique culture, values, and structures of your institution. Our focus is on helping you think about best practices and how to bring people from across your institution together to tune those practices to improve DEI and student success at your campus. Every institution is different, and that means every institution needs to build an approach that will be effective in its context. There is no standardized approach.

The workshop begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, October 12, and ends at 12:00 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, October 14. Workshop sessions will include:

  • Short, informal presentations by each team about their institution and the goals of their diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success work to date.
  • Presentation by HEDS staff on overall findings from the hundreds of institutions that have participated in the HEDS Diversity and Equity Campus Climate Survey.
  • Time for teams to develop their project plans.
  • Poster session in which teams present their plans for diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success work at their institutions.
  • Concluding session on working through common challenges in diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success projects.

Limited Availablity

To ensure that we can provide effective support to workshop participants, we keep our workshops small. We have room for around 50 people, or 10-15 teams, depending on the size of the teams. We’ll accept registrations on a first-come, first-served basis until September 2 or until we reach capacity.

Participation Requirements

  • Your institution should send a team of 3-5 people.
  • Team members should represent at least two different offices/areas on campus, such as student affairs, academic affairs, institutional research, etc. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and student success are everyone’s responsibility, and teams should represent more than one area at your institution to ensure that the work isn’t isolated in one office or among a small group of your colleagues.
  • Team members should meet prior to the workshop to discuss their focus for the workshop and gather/review data, documents, and other material that’s relevant to their work at the retreat. We may send out a few readings or short questions for teams to address before the meeting.
  • We’d like your president or provost to write a brief letter indicating their support for the team and the project they’re working on.
  • The workshop is open to teams from HEDS member institutions only. Your institution must pay its 2023-2024 membership fee prior to the date of the workshop.

Registration & Hotel

Details coming soon.

If you have questions about the workshop, please email Kelly McDorman.