Equity Conscious Community College Pathways
The Equity Conscious Community College Pathways (EC3P) is a comprehensive national project focused on building student and practitioner pipelines through advancing guided pathways that support mobility for first-generation, underserved, and minoritized youth, as well as promoting career pathways and equity-centered training for community college educators. The project reflects OCCRL's commitment to building new means of engagement for learners and leaders; and to empowering, elevating, and fostering equitable educational outcomes, in collaboration with the Pathways Collaborative.
The Pathways Collaborative is a group of organizations committed to improving rates of college completion, transfer, and attainment of jobs with value in the labor market — and achieving equity in those outcomes. The Pathways Collaborative's website provides tools and resources for colleges to who are implementing or scaling the guided pathways model.
Major Project Activities
Community Colleges for All (CC-ALL)
A series of condensed and engaging digital materials that promote and foster success and equitable programs for diverse learners as they move through their guided programs. Provides convenient online access for everyone who wants to advance issues related to community colleges.
Engaging Excellence in Equity Fellows
A participatory research study fueled by fellows who are successfully supporting success among underserved minoritized populations of students, with the goal of understanding which environments advance learning completion for underserved racial minorities.
Ensure Students are Learning
The Ensure Students are Learning Issue Briefs and Spotlight Briefs were designed in conjunction with the Center for Community College Student Engagement to help produce equity-centered practices and outcomes for all students.
Idea Lab Focus Groups
Focus groups discussing promising practices and exemplars as well as generating ideas that can foster programmatic, departmental, institutional, and system strategies for broadening participation and completion of underrepresented students of color in community college pathways/programs of study.
Leaders in Equity-Centered Transformation Initiative Spark Grants Program
Community college grants focused on culturally responsive and collaborative ideas that address long-standing inequities that directly affect student success. View the grant recipients.
Pathways Collaborative Equity Partners Fund
Grants to Pathways Collaborative Partners, individually or collaboratively, to test aspects of an intervention, program, practice, or strategy to improve or promote equity-centered and culturally responsive initiatives. View the grant recipients.
Project Goals
1. To develop the necessary resources to effectively scale what is learned relative to bridges to community college attendance, supporting colleges as they guide students to begin and remain on clear pathways to a credential; and providing seed-grant support for design and completion of equity-centered, high-impact practices that engage and retain students of color and other underserved students on guided pathways.
2. To build awareness and capacity of culturally proficient leaders at community colleges with the development of a networked community of equity-minded, two-year student-services practitioners.
3. To create professional development platforms that support increased awareness and integration of student supports offering community college educators tangible tools to enhance programmatic pathways that positively affect student outcomes.
Advisory Board Members
Jerlando F.L. Jackson, Advisory Board Chair/Sr. Consultant, Vilas Distinguished Professor and Director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion (WEI) Lab, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Estela Bensimon, Professor of Higher Education and Director, Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California
Gloria Crisp, Associate Professor, College of Education, Oregon State University
Dhnafu Elston, Vice President of Strategy, Complete College America
Mary Howard-Hamilton, Raleigh Holmstedt Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, Department of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Foundations, Indiana State University
Christopher M. Mullin, Director of Strong Start to Finish, Education Commission of the States
Amelia Parnell, Vice President for Research and Policy, NASPA - Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education
Linda Tillman, Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership, School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Stephanie Waterman, Associate Professor, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, University of Toronto
Jaime Washington, President – Washington Consulting Group and Vice President, ACPA - College Student Educators International
Heather Wathington, Chief Executive Officer, See Forever Foundation/Maya Angelou Schools (DC)
