In Trust Center
The In Trust Center podcast is hosted by Matt Hufman. Walk alongside theological school leaders and innovators as they explore issues relevant to North American seminaries, all while helping institutions live out their missions more intentionally. Find more at intrust.org/podcast.
In Trust Center
Ep. 76: Creating a new ecosystem in theological education
The Rev. Dr. David Vásquez-Levy, president of Pacific School of Theology in Berkeley, California, discusses how the school is using its Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative grant to create a new ecosystem that includes not just technology but also efforts to reconsider educational modes and methods. The school's programming includes a stackable curriculum and challenges traditional standards.
Hello, and welcome to the Intrast Center Podcast, where we connect with experts and innovators in theological education around topics important to theological school leaders. Thank you for joining us. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Good Governance Podcast. I'm Matt Huffman. With me today is the Reverend Dr. David Vasquez-Levy, the president of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. David, welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. It's great to be here.
SPEAKER_02:We're going to start talking a little bit about uh your pathways for tomorrow grant. The PSR has a phase three grant. Uh the title of the project, Ignite a New Educational Ecosystem for Diverse Christian Leaders. Let's just start a little bit about give me the elevator speech, the encapsulated what is it?
SPEAKER_00:At its core, this is a community learning platform. So the idea is that we are engaging the value of technology to be able to create a distributed network of learning that is powered by a diverse collective of both institutions and individuals.
SPEAKER_02:Now it's uh we you and I have talked, I've talked with some of your staff and and your team in Berkeley a little bit about it. It's really an engaging project, and and you've I would say, as somebody who grew up in the Bay Area, I mean you've kind of leveraged the best of the Bay Area. You've got tech folks, you've got diversity, you've got diversity of thought, you've got a lot of energy in this. Um so it's a really kind of cool program in which you're using platform, a platform to push things out. But it's not just technology.
SPEAKER_00:Not at all. No, I think the technology enables things. Ultimately, uh our campuses are a technology, right? And we invest a lot in those. Uh so there's lots of ways in which technology has always shaped the way we do education, the way we prepare leaders. And uh so I think part of it is to think about the technology simply as an enabler, hopefully, of what we do. And certainly we are seeing uh technology revolution. Uh and the way to think about the project and its implications is that we are seeking to create a distributed network. So I often will use the example, I'm originally from Guatemala. So my mom in Guatemala is watching telenovela, soap operas, that she used to watch mostly from Mexico and Colombia. Now she's watching them from Turkey, from China, from South Korea, right? Because we've had this massive technological development of streaming media, we've had we've had it disrupt in many ways. Uh media content, right? We went from three major TV stations, right, ABC, NBC, CBS, to then this cable period where lots of expression explosion of possibilities. And then we moved to this distributed networks in which just anyone can possibly create content, right? Media content in Instagram, in YouTube, and all this explosion. And this really disrupted that system. At the beginning, it felt like, oh my gosh, you know, this is going to ruin entertainment. The reality is in the end, it's really pushed us at a time as a society to tell more stories than we ever have. So the question is, what are the implications of that type of technology to theological education? You know, what is the role of our institutions, educational institutions? At PSR, we have said this is a move to go from a primarily teaching institution to a learning network. How do we center the voices of historically marginalized communities in that project? How do we queer binaries? And the term queer we use very advisedly, right? The intent is to say how do we break binaries between who is a teacher and who has the possibility to do that, and then really think about various ways in how we learn from various expertise within our system? How do we queer binaries that come of our understanding of lay leadership and ordain leadership, or uh continuing education and really think about degrees? Can we create pathways that allow people to be more on a spectrum of learning rather than just in the static possibilities that you're not a learner and then you're a learner for three years at an MDiv at a residential institution really intensely?
SPEAKER_02:Well, you all you all have done um some interesting work on this already. I mean, the the one of the things I appreciated, and you and I have talked about this with your master of divinity degree. You've you've stacked the curriculum in such a way that it's not an all or nothing. You know, you're you're able to make progress throughout it with credentialing through that.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, and maybe a way to think about it, I'll use some metaphors in this conversation. So uh when my kids were little and they were learning to swim, I loved our local pool because it was a zero entry pool, right? If you've been a zero entry pool, right, when you're little, you're just learning, you can walk right into it, right? It reflects a beach when you're just walking down. And as you take further steps, paso a paso, right? You're getting a little deeper and a little deeper, right? Theological education right now is like you just jump into the deep end, right? You got a graduate level education, you've got to have all these requirements and expectations. You have to have discerned so much before you consider making this kind of an investment. Right. So what we need is a zero-entry pool, right? A way in which people that as they begin to seek a solution to something they're trying to do, they're leading their congregation, or you know, they've ended up doing that perhaps because of a gap in leadership in their community, or they're just starting to feel a call. What is that opportunity that used to take place through an entire system, right? It used to take place because you started out in Sunday school and somebody said to you, you know, you really ought to think about getting involved more in the church. And then that would get affirmed. You're at camp on that Friday night fire around the, you know, around the fire, the camp, uh campfire, and thinking, yes, uh, I will accept this sort of invitation to think about my role as leadership and then go to a church camp or a college of the church. Eventually, by the time you've gone through that whole process of discernment and preparation, a three-year master's program makes some sense, right? And with some backing for your community and resources. We need to regenerate that entire ecosystem of discernment and of preparation to create that zero-pool entry. So what we did at PSR, it has been a long project, right? Our current pathways projects and the resources that the grant has brought us is actually bringing to fruition a 10-year project, right? Like they always say, you know, you have those overnight successes that took you know 30 years to make, right? So in our case, um, you know, 10 years ago, we set out to say we need to be able to reimagine our institution through its program, through its people, its program and its place, right? I like alliterations, I'm a homolitician, right? So we being we began with people. How do we reimagine our institution from the board of trustees, which for governance discussions is really significant? We needed to have a much more diverse uh board of trustees. We then needed to really diversify our faculty and diversify our staff, and then really diversify our student body. And those were happening all in and continuum with each other. It was essential that all layers of the institution were reimagined in that way. Then we went from that to how does this group of people create new programs? And so out of that came what you just described as our stackable approach to education. So we looked at the fact that many communities were struggling either because of the cost of a three-year degree or the persistence of people, or they came into theological education and after a year they're like, you know, this isn't for me, or I run out of money, or my denomination doesn't really require the whole thing. So the faculty sat together and thought about let's develop our curriculum so that every year of the curriculum has its own educational and pedagogical uh plan. And so the first year ends in a certificate of spirituality and social change. And at the end of that year, uh that may be the reason you came and you're good and you move on. Or you can stay on and do a Master of Arts in social transformation. That really deepens your leadership capacity. Uh and also sounds really interesting, right? If you're trying to apply for a different kind of job that is not necessarily within a congregational setting, because many of our students, particularly from communities of color, are serving as bivocational individuals, and so their CV looks different with a you know an MA degree. Uh and then the third year completes the requirements of the MDIP. So that was one of the things that have to be in place in order for us to develop this project of the platform to start. That began our move towards the zero entry pool, right? The project now is trying to then move even lower than that first year to create more accessible elements of education that really get people started on that pathway of their education.
SPEAKER_02:So you talked earlier about querying things. Talk to me about what that means, because I think for I know how you've used it in the past. I think we've had some of these discussions, but you're talking about binary things and creating something new. Tell me a little bit about what what somebody new to this conversation should hear when you say that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, where you know the etymology of the word queer, uh, we hear in lots of ways, right? It's it's odd, right? So people would use that's kind of queer, right? It's been derogatory language used against people who are LGBTQ. Uh and so, like many derogatory language against used against marginalized communities, sometimes you take it on, right? And so many people will use the term queer to refer to their identity along a spectrum of gender identity. Uh but it goes from all of those elements, right? There is the curiosity of the word queer, which are queering, right? When you're you're you're asking questions, you're challenging and thinking, the oddness of things, right? But a lot of it has to do with binary breaking binaries. So starting out with queer theory, which is one of the ways in which the work of LGBTQ scholars in theology and in other disciplines uh have titled that work, it has been the idea of dismantling these binary understandings of gender and creating full inclusion. So queering begins to then be thought of as this idea that we are breaking binaries. We're really questioning some of the ways in which we've allocated understandings of hierarchy and power and authority, and then the static sort of identity uh places. So it's both about embracing that full uh radical inclusion of people uh as they understand themselves, but also what do we learn from being in the in-between? So that's where I'm I'm straight and it says gender, yet I use queering in my own identity because I am hybrid in so many ways, right? I'm a hyphenated American, right? I grew up in Guatemala, I live in the US, and I and so I live in the in-between. I'm an immigrant, migrants and many of our communities that are immigrant communities know how to live in the in-between. And increasingly many of our congregational members and communities are seeing themselves in a spectrum, right? Not just necessarily in this camp or that, but really querying that. So queering is really significant, particularly right now in a time of depolarization in our churches. How do we create and challenge any kind of binary uh that really limits or silos that separate? So queering in that sense is about questioning, imagination, creating space.
SPEAKER_02:Wait, you mentioned like in the in-between space, and in theological education, there's been no shortage of discussion about how we're in between things. And there's this tension in that. I think your project is interesting in that sense of when you used it earlier, you talked about it's like queering the system, I think, is is kind of I don't have the exact words, but this idea that the zero entry pool, you're not necessarily a degree candidate yet. You're not you're in a degree program, but you're not in a degree program. You might end up with a certificate because you might decide that's all I need, or that's all I can afford at this point. In the distributed model, that you know, you've talked about the pathways project. Uh there's a sense of that as well, as you as you're talking about what I hear you saying about where people are learning from, decentralizing some of that, of of who's learning or where the learning's coming from, or or the distribution networks. So let's talk about that as like the distribution networks. You've talked about you know different types of students finding you know a diversity of audience, finding different networks. Talk a little bit about that process and how that's been, because that's not you know what has been the traditional pathway to theological education.
SPEAKER_00:Very much. You know, I think um one of the uh uh uh ways that we've articulated what it is that we're trying to sort of counter in our work, right? Coming from who we are as a very diverse uh community and largely uh people of color, uh we have said, you know, we need to do this work uh of decolonizing the type of education that we do. Now, in academic institutions, there's been a ton of work done uh to decolonize various aspects of our understanding, to really challenge uh historically uh you know white center uh approaches in in terms of its content. But we've kept our systems of delivery, our structures quite traditional. We continue to identify, for example, to define excellence by exclusion. If you think about higher education, the best schools in the system, according to US News and World Report, are the ones who exclude the most people, right? If they what the first thing that you're gonna look at is how many people get in. And that percentage for the top institutions in the country in higher ed has been reducing as the population has grown, right? And so now that wouldn't work for a hospital, right? If you say that the best hospital is the one that turns away 97% of the people who need their uh services, that that would just be absurd, right? But in higher education, even in progressive higher education, we bought the whole thing, right? And we orient ourselves to that. So I often and others have referred to this in this way as trickle-down academics. So you invest massive amounts of resources on a small group of absolutely excellent people defined in very particular ways that actually are very oriented to traditional understandings of education and learning, and you poured a lot of resources into them in the hopes that their knowledge will trickle down into the system. The reality is that it hasn't happened, right? The knowledge of many communities has not made its way into the transformative realities of our society. As we face what the World Economic Forum has called a poly crisis in the world, as the church tries to rise to respond to this moment of great anxiety, great uncertainty, we need leaders with a wide range of experiences. We need knowledge that comes not only from sort of the traditional understandings of how we think of base knowledge, right? In the colonial project, a 500-year project of colony, uh, hierarchies were created of race, of gender, and power was attached to that hierarchy, and certain forms of knowledge were privileged, while we discounted other forms of knowledge. The basic example, I was growing up in Guatemala, God forbid you would play a drum or dance, right? Those things, which I was grew up in a Lutheran tradition, right? Very European, very German in its own shapings. So the thing is those forms of knowledge, of movement, of story, uh, were not things that were really viewed as assets of knowledge. Right now we're facing a crisis in the world in many places. We need the wisdom from as many communities as we can. So for us, the move is to say how do we create a distributed network that helps us to learn in broader ways. I'll give you another example, if I may.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, please.
SPEAKER_00:So um my undergraduate degree was in computer science and math. So you know my brain functions in very warped ways because of that in reality.
SPEAKER_02:Or very logical ways.
SPEAKER_00:So uh I don't know if you've heard uh about Watson, the computer Watson. So yeah. So Watson, as you know, is now the computer that can beat any human at chess. It took decades for Watson to be able to beat some of the top uh human players, right? And at the beginning, what they were doing is trying to make Watson bigger and bigger. So that's a centralized model, right? You pour more and more resources into a single computer that can try to replicate a human brain and beat that brain. It didn't work. Decades of investment building that computer bigger and bigger didn't work. When Watson was finally able to beat humans was because of chess.com. So chess.com is a free place where billions of people play chess every day. And now Watson began to learn from that distributed network. So that's a distributed network, right? Humans all over the world in all kinds of settings, of all kinds of backgrounds, playing chess with this machine. And so Watson's paying attention and learning, right? So that's the move from a teaching institution to a learning network. You're watching this happen, and the wisdom that comes out of that distributed network is unparalleled by any centralized system. So the challenge for theological education is that we continue to try to prop up very strong centralized uh systems. Uh, we orient ourselves to those institutes, to those nodes in the system with the most resources, with the most focus, and and really what we need to do is to create a much more distributed place in which who is a teacher in that space? How do we learn about innovation in congregational ministry from the storefront Guatemalan ministry that is two blocks from my house, right? How do I understand, how do I think about leadership from the guy who's the dishwasher on Thursday but is the pastor on Sunday, right? And and and I'm not saying that disciplines and scholarship that we have traditionally amass and accumulator isn't important. It's just that it's not sufficient, right? And what we need to do is to engage in a much more iterative conversation. And technology now allows us to do this in much better ways.
SPEAKER_02:I appreciate the the uh analogy of Watson, the computer and the distributed network. Um and and I love, you know, every time I've chatted with you with with uh your vice president of academic fair Susan Abraham, wonderful, thoughtful, uh very, very thoughtful, you know, considerations, not just of the theology, but the methods and modes of of finding voices that haven't been in involved in the conversation, as you say. I mean, how do how do you learn from the person you know two blocks down? The question here would I guess is how do you measure this? I mean, what what does this look like for you when you say we're there or this is and and I we we know each other, I know where you're at, I'm sure you'll never be there, right? There's always gonna be a different node to try, a different this, but but what does success may not be the right term, but what does what shows you you're on the right path to where you're going? What's the metric for you, or what are the stories that you say, boy, that shows me.
SPEAKER_00:Amen. To that. Well, first, because you've identified both of the measures. In most research or most assessment efforts, you know, you have both qualitative and quantitative uh data points, right? So we certainly have some very uh, you know, quantitative data that has to do with, you know, we've had to do a lot of thinking about how do we create a system that ultimately becomes financially sustainable, right? Uh in our work at PSR, I said we gotta meet the double bottom line. So we gotta have both deliver on our mission and keep a financial bottom line. If we run out of one or the other, it we it's not a sustainable institution, right? If we have lots of mission but we break the bank, we're not gonna be around very long. If we accumulate lots of resources, keep a balanced budget, but don't deliver on our mission, we're not gonna be around very long, or at least not very effective in what we do. So we have to have some of those measurements. And so we've spent time trying to redefine what is the measure, the sort of this core engine of our financial and missional well-being. Where do they meet the most, right? Historically, for theological institutions, for most most learning institutions, it has been, let's say, tuition, right? Because tuition is a symbol of somebody giving you some resources because they believe in something you're doing and you're delivering on your mission, right? When I I express it in handout degrees, I say you have been certified, right? Right. By because we believe you become the type of leader that we have sought to form, right? So that so in a way, one of the measurements is tuition, right? It's disorienting in theological education because we discount tuition so much, right? And so it's a little bit harder to figure out where is our orientation. So for us it's been okay, if tuition is one of those critical measurements, right? How do we look significantly at where the value exchanges? How do we develop a measure that says people are willing to put some money down of their own because they see value in what we're doing, and then they receive some value because of it. Part of the Pathways project we are doing is right now the value exchange, if you understand, if you that term makes sense, right? It happens in a very intense moment, right? So we are recruiting people for let's say, it takes three years right now in ATS schools to go from inquiry to enrollment, right? And then when you enroll, there's a major exchange, right? Students are putting in a lot of resources into it, their time, sometimes their money or their loans or whatever's coming in, and you're giving them a massive amount of education over a three-year period. So the question is how do we expand in this zero entry point that value exchange, provide opportunities for people to learn, where we deliver value to them, and then they contribute to it. And the reason that that matters in terms of the measurements, right, of how we are trying to achieve the work that we do, is that when people whose education is for whom education is valuable, that would be one of our key markers, that people actually value what we are delivering and are willing to contribute to it within their ability, right? And that's why you have to have iterative opportunities for people to be able to contribute to that. So that's one of the qual, you know, really clearly quantitative measurements. How many people are in the system? How are we getting to the place in which they see value enough to contribute to it on their own, you know, and to sustain it, to help sustain it? Uh certainly there's the much really critically important qualitative uh conversations, right? Those moments uh at PSR always tell folks our commitment in education, regardless of whether you're here for a three-year degree or you know, just a short certificate program, is that we will blow your mind, embolden your heart, and strengthen your hands. And so the qualitative measurement is can people really have those moments where their mind has been blown? Where when what they care deeply about all of a sudden is placed in this much larger hole. That's theological education at its best. And we are paying attention to those moments that can happen certainly in a graduate program where somebody's been with us for months and really deeply embedded, but it's also happening on those very uh iterative experiences of a small cohort online, of something that somebody watches, and all of a sudden they're like, wow, I see the world differently, right? That their hearts are being emboldened. And we are paying attention in our assessment, in our surveys, uh, to listen to how people are really finding themselves much more able to stay in the positions to see the long view, to be resilient in their work, but more importantly, in their ability to do that for the communities they lead, right? And so we're seeking and being attentive to the narrative stories people are saying about how they're becoming more resilient in their spaces because of the education we're delivering to them and the community that they are forming. And third is the strengthening of the hands. We're looking very clearly to say, tell us the stories about how our education is helping you to do your job better. What are the skills you're really developing? And that is also in a new distributed system, much more iterative and much uh more quickly happening. We have certainly, like many institutions, pondered about the shift that radically happened from in-person intensive education to online education, right? And wondering if we could develop something of formation as deep as that is, right? Uh but what we are finding is that one of the shifts, there's things that you lose in that shift, but there's things you gain. And one of the things you gain is that what we are teaching, when I'm teaching my preaching class, which I'm committed to teaching, so I teach at least once a year, right? The when I'm telling folks you got, you know, what does it mean to be prophetic? And then they're in a congregational setting, because they're in 30 states, right? In radically different contexts. That's gonna mean something very different in Montana than it does, you know, in San Francisco, right?
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:But in the classroom, that iterative knowledge, is this skill helping me? Am I developing the skill that's gonna help me get my preaching, as one of the authors we read says, be you know, not necessarily acceptable, but for it to be hearable, right? And that does that make sense where we're developing skills, right? So in the qualitative side, we're really paying attention to the stories of our students, to how they're responding, to how the education is making an impact in those three ways.
SPEAKER_02:How are you seeing this, uh, the metric so far? You've still got, I think, another year, year and a half on your grant. Um where are you at?
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, the we've had two very successful pilots for the project. You know, I think as we undertook this project, like many of us who wrote this grants, uh, you know, you uh are aspirational uh and probably a little aggressive on your timeline, right? As we got into the project, we just realized the expansiveness of the idea that we were trying to develop. Uh, because the project is not just for PSR to develop its own platform. Lots of us are trying to do that. It's actually to create a distributed network where other seminaries and other partners uh whose knowledge comes from their not-for-profit leadership, from business, from other partners that can create content on this platform and to create that. So the technological requirements turned out to be quite a bit more extensive. So we decided to run two pilots initially, and both of them were very successful. One of them was actually involving all of our current students, right? So that is the the community element of the platform. How do you really do community well and formation within that community where people connect to one another within an existing network of people, right? So our students were on that, we called that the Ignite Collective. The other one we call Project K. And this was the fuller version of the platform with a few partners offering coursework and trying to see if we could attract people that had nothing to do with theological education. They were not part of our existing networks, but basically, could we uh get attention to what we would offer and then get serious feedback from them? So we were able to get 175 participants. We were looking at about, you know, in beta uh testing based on the research we had done and the partners that we were helping us with this. We needed to have between 75 and 200 people. So we had 175 very quickly. So it was a huge response. People have a hunger for a space like what we were trying to create. And they participated in this beta, and their response was phenomenal, right? Very engaged. So now comes the implementation of the full platform, bringing these two things together. It's required us actually moving to a different base platform that will allow us to do this and building it out. We had hoped to just use something off the shelf that we could, you know, not have to have much of a hand in tailoring, but we've had to do more tailoring than we thought. So this fall, we will be launching the full platform with a couple of partners, including some of our partner seminaries. Uh, there'll be some uh Robedi, several courses on that. And then the test that comes next is the previous iterations. There has been funding that people have had to contribute in different ways to participate in it, but a lot of it is not yet sort of the part we have to test is where is the price point that people will be willing to do and to participate. And so the success of that will be significant. So we feel the pressure, right? Because we now are halfway through the grant, we have a year and a half, uh, where we got to be able to see then that financial uh part of it also be tested as some of the elements have proven themselves to be successful.
SPEAKER_02:So we'll certainly check back with you as you you head toward that in three. The testing, uh, to see what you're finding and learning. I want to wrap up on this. You know, you're this is not a little project. It is not in terms of, I mean, I think the scope of the imagination, uh but not just that, this isn't a piece of an institution. You're using this to continue the transformation of PSR. I mean, this is really this is the yeast going into the leaven to use the biblical, you're it's it's throughout the organization. But when people hear this, and when, you know, boards and other senior leaders, you know, there I I'll be curious to hear their reactions to this because this is a major is a major project, and and there are lots of folks talking in theological education about doing this kind of institutional work, this kind of reimagination, and you're using technology, you're using it as you've talked about, different theories to approach it, different types of people. Very holistic. What's the advice you would tell a board? What's the advice you would tell a senior leader? A couple of things that come to mind. If you know you're at an event, we're we're sitting here in Atlanta, Georgia at an ATS gathering at the ATS biennial, and somebody catches you in the hall and says, David, I hear you're doing this piece of work. I'm thinking about something. What would you tell them?
SPEAKER_00:I, you know, I have to limit myself on the amount of things I would say. So let me try a few. Uh first one will be collaborate. You know, uh that is the essence uh of for all of the anxieties we have about AI and technology emergence uh uh and all of this polarization. Ultimately the reality is we have the capacity to be more collaborative than we have ever been. You know, uh we're teaching across the whole nation, uh tiny regional seminaries, large institutions, right? So collaborate, find people who have been doing this work. Uh you know, we encourage and hope to have partners work with us in the platform that we're doing. So collaborate would be the major thing, right? How can we do this better together? Uh for board leadership, um, you know, it's probably a longer answer, but let me start out here. Uh what is the strategic initiatives that you are doing? The way we have been approaching our strategic plan is through what we call an adaptive, what we, you know, from some partnerships uh identify this process of an adaptive strategic plan. Just realizing that we are entering a time where what you know future is called a cone of possibility, right? If you think about a cone, right, that just right now with all of the disruptions happening, the cone of possibility is really wide. That means things could go really well or things could go really bad, right? In times of great disruption, that cone of possibility opens widely. So what's really important is that the clarity and the importance of a board and of executive leadership to try not to predict the future, but to narrow that cone of possibility is critically important, right? And that requires that very ascetic discipline, right? The aesthetics knew how to say no to some things so they could say to yes to other things. So a lot of it really begins by that in-depth understanding. We started out looking at a fifth, where do we want to be in 50 years? And uh Patrick Reyes was helping us, who's uh you know on our board now, to do this work. And he said, we're gonna look at 50 years out, because at that point none of us are around and our job doesn't depend on it, right? So then you look way, way out there and then start to work backwards, right? To think about what will it take for us to get to that vision, right? And then implement. In our adaptive strategic plan, then we take with that long, long-term vision, what's what are the next three years look like? You know, and in that three year period, we want to have clarity of our identity. What is it that we're trying to do? Mission clarity. What are we trying to do? For us is prepare spiritually rooted leaders to create a world where all can thrive, right? The next step is okay, if that's our identity, what is the best strategy for us to accomplish that mission? Right. And historically, we have done our best strategy has been a graduate program, right? That's how we felt, that's why we created these programs, right? And now we're saying, yeah, that remains a strategy, but we'll do the stackable approach. And then there's a second strategy, which is a distributed network. And now it's both strategies have to collaborate and work together. Naming that as a really important strategy was critical from the top down, right? Because you are reallocating resources, you are really challenging folks to think differently and to not to look at the second strategy as a sideshow or as a distraction, right? It really requires us to do that. And then you move from that into your organizational design. Given that this is our identity and our mission, these are the strategies we've committed to. How do we allocate our resources and organize ourselves to accomplish that in the best possible way? We've captured that in a short document that it's used at every board meeting, at every faculty meeting, at every staff meeting, at every interview with a new faculty or staff to just tell folks this is what we're doing, this is the way we're trying to do it, and this is your part in it, right? And that's just been really critical to help us to do that. It doesn't solve all the problems, right? You're still going to have some discussions about whether this is the right vision. So the part we do is every six months, we go through the whole process and evaluate whether our current alignment and measure our progress and decide what kind of adjustment do we want to do to ensure what are the priorities that we need to pay attention to every six months to make sure we're staying on target.
SPEAKER_02:Fantastic. David, thank you so much for your time. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity and look forward to further conversations.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for listening to the Intrust Center's Good Governance Podcast. For more information about this podcast, other episodes, and additional resources, visit intrust.org.