Building community in meaningful ways: a talk with new Associate Director, Chelsea Wood
Settling into her new role as Associate Director and Graduate Program Coordinator of SAFS, Chelsea Wood is excited to help SAFS scale up its efforts to build community. “Learning and growth happen when people feel a sense of belonging, and that can be fostered by embedding them in a strong community,” she says. “Strong academic communities are tightly networked, with many and robust connections between individual people and across lab groups. My goal is to help strengthen these links.” Her ideas? They come from speaking with the different groups that make up SAFS and responding directly to their needs.
One of the many challenges of the pandemic was a loss of connection: links became weaker and fewer. Interactions were at a minimum, and this was particularly felt by those grad students, undergrads, staff, post-docs, and faculty just starting at SAFS.
Chelsea is excited to start renewing the SAFS network in a variety of ways: from the micro (e.g., mentor–mentee relationships) to the macro (e.g., strengthening sense of belonging in the SAFS community).
One of these initiatives will be a workshop for faculty to develop or improve their Lab Guides, which guide interactions in a lab, provide policies and rules, and lay out expectations. By increasing the proportion of labs with Lab Guides and the quality of Lab Guides across labs that already have them, Chelsea expects that this workshop will improve communication and community within labs and consistency across labs (the three priority themes identified by the SAFS E&I Committee from the results of the SAFS Equity Audit).
Another of Chelsea’s goals is to support mentor–mentee pairs to use evidence-backed tools for working together productively, even in challenging times. She’ll leverage the Academic Leadership Training that 14 SAFS faculty undertook in 2019, making the lessons learned during this four-day workshop available to faculty who were unable to attend the 2019 workshop, and also creating new trainings based on this material for admin teams, post-docs, and grads.
Chelsea believes that evidence-backed mentorship strategies are best modeled and disseminated within peer groups. Modeled on the peer mentoring groups headed by UW Advancement and on the book Every Other Thursday, Chelsea wants to introduce similar “mentor-to-mentor” groups that meet to troubleshoot one another’s mentorship challenges. Mentorship is something that is critical to many people’s jobs but is rarely officially taught. In bringing this initiative to SAFS, Chelsea wants to bring people together, to talk and to learn, and to improve leadership skills, which will foster a deeper sense of community. Benefitting from these groups for the past seven years, Chelsea shares that it has been invaluable in improving her ability to be a leader for people in her lab.
Accessible, open, and highly attended community-building events are another priority for Chelsea, and in her view these are key for knitting people together across lab groups. She plans to relaunch weekly SAFS Café, monthly faculty-led outings, and is excited to hear the community’s ideas for other ways to foster meaningful and lasting connections.
Chelsea’s role is multi-faceted and when asked about what most excites her in developing and driving these initiatives, she shared that she’s keen to hear everyone’s ideas about how we can make SAFS a better place to learn, grow, teach, and work. As Graduate Program Coordinator, she’s driven to learn from grads about how their community can better support them. As Associate Director of SAFS, her ears are open to the whole community. Her key takeaway is that learning and growth come when we have a sense of belonging; together we can find ways to bring that sense of belonging to all members of the SAFS community.