Scaling organizational change in higher education is hard. Scaling it across institutions while staying focused on equity, student outcomes, and shared purpose is even harder.
That challenge sits at the heart of the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP), a multi-year, research-informed initiative led by Community College Research Initiatives (CCRI) at the University of Washington. STP brings together faculty, staff, administrators, and undergraduate transfer students from community colleges and universities across Washington State to improve STEM transfer and degree completion for students from low-income backgrounds.
As STP entered a new phase known as STP 2.0, teams were asked to do something ambitious: expand. Institutions added new partners, disciplines, departments, and, critically, undergraduate transfer students as full team members. With growth came opportunity, but also real questions:
- How do teams expand without losing clarity or momentum?
- What structures and practices help new members engage meaningfully?
- How can student voices be centered in this process?
- And what does it take to sustain collaboration as complexity increases?
Our newest data note, Expanding Organizational Change Teams: Insights from the STEM Transfer Partnership, explores these questions using survey data collected from STP community of practice members during the early stages of STP 2.0.
Why this data note matters
Research on organizational change often emphasizes the difficulty of moving beyond small pilot teams. Yet many initiatives stall not because the ideas are flawed, but because growth isn’t intentionally designed. This data note offers practice-grounded insight into what team expansion actually feels like from the inside across 19 institutions and an approximately 160-member community of practice.
Rather than focusing on outcomes alone, the data note examines the conditions that support (or complicate) expansion, surfacing lessons that are relevant well beyond STP for anyone engaged in cross-institutional partnerships, transfer reform, or equity-centered change work.
Key insights from STP 2.0
Across four surveys administered in 2025, several consistent themes emerged:
- Start with relationships. Expansion was smoothest when teams built on existing professional relationships. New partnerships were possible, but required more intentional structure and relationship-building.
- Use data to anchor shared purpose. Shared data helped teams align priorities, move beyond anecdote, and focus conversations, especially as new institutions and disciplines joined the work.
- Document direction through action planning. Clear, written action plans were essential for helping new members understand goals, roles, and how their contributions fit into the larger effort.
- Collaborative culture matters as much as tools. Trust, mutual respect, and inclusive decision-making allowed teams to use data and planning tools productively, even as teams grew.
- Communication infrastructure is not optional. Shared documents, centralized repositories, and tools like AI-supported meeting notes helped teams stay connected across schedules and institutions.
- Onboarding is essential infrastructure. Informal onboarding quickly breaks down at scale. Teams benefited from written materials, timelines, and documented decisions to reduce confusion and reliance on institutional memory.
- Smaller subgroups support engagement and sustainability. Creating working groups with clear leads and co-leads helped distribute leadership and prevent burnout.
- Student voice requires intentional role design. Undergraduate transfer students were widely viewed as a strength of STP 2.0, but teams needed clearer structures to support meaningful participation.
- Flexibility supports equity. Offering multiple ways to participate—synchronous, asynchronous, large-group, and task-based—made engagement more feasible amid heavy workloads and with existing incentive systems.
Together, these findings reinforce a core takeaway: expanding change teams isn’t just about adding people. It’s about designing the conditions that allow growth to strengthen collective capacity for change.
Join the conversation
The full data note goes deeper into each of these insights, drawing directly from participant voices and connecting them to broader research on organizational change.
If you’re working to expand a cross-institutional partnership, integrate student voices, or sustain momentum in complex change efforts, we invite you to read the full data note and reflect on how these lessons resonate with your own context.
👉 Read the full data note: Expanding Organizational Change Teams: Insights from the STEM Transfer Partnership
We also invite you to continue the conversation:
- Which of these lessons feels most relevant to your work right now?
- Where has expansion strengthened your efforts, and where has it created new challenges?
Change at scale is a design challenge. We hope these insights help inform how you design for growth, collaboration, and equity in your own initiatives.