Expanding Change Teams Without Losing Momentum: Lessons from the STEM Transfer Partnership

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.

Rooted in Community: Four Elements of Effective Rural-Responsive Mentorship

Data Note 3 in the Rural Learners Success Series

Mentoring is a high-impact practice that strengthens student persistence—especially for learners navigating systemic inequities—yet rural community college students often face compounded barriers (distance, fewer services, and the time pressures of work and caregiving) that make sustained mentoring harder to access. Because many mentoring frameworks were designed outside rural and community college contexts, adapting them to these settings by leveraging rural strengths—tight-knit relationships, reciprocity, and community networks—can surface otherwise untapped supports in places where staffing and funding are limited.

In our third data note of the Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students project, we present a working model of Adaptive Rural-Responsive Mentorship, to serve as something colleges can adapt, question, and build upon as they deepen their own approaches to rural-responsive mentorship, and the Data Note includes a worksheet to facilitate this process.

This rural-responsive model was derived by adapting general mentoring practices that were most salient to themes from interviews with 25 mentees, and 27 mentors and mentor programming staff across seven rural-serving community colleges and refined through dialogue with rural college leaders at the Rural Community College Alliance Conference. Together, these perspectives ground the model in the lived experiences of rural students and the practitioners who support them.

Across interviews, effective rural mentorship consistently reflected four elements that will feel familiar to many practitioners—while also showing how rural context gives each one a distinct “shape.”:

Relational trust through tight-knit interrelationships and reciprocity, often built through consistency, shared community ties, and personal connection
Holistic support through personal and responsive care attuned to rural material realities, including attention to basic needs like transportation, childcare, and food security
Engaging and supporting identity and belonging shaped by place and culture, by affirming students’ languages, role of family, and community knowledge
Cultivating resource connection through bridging rural community networks, by helping students access opportunities beyond the campus

While these four elements resonated strongly, college leaders also emphasized that their application is shaped by the daily institutional conditions that determine what’s possible. Three themes stood out:

Mentorship must evolve with students and context, as rural student experiences, responsibilities, and needs continue to change
Sustaining trust through collaboration and continuity, particularly amid staff transitions, shifting roles, and limited institutional capacity
Centering culture, belonging, and resource connection, as core conditions for persistence rather than add-ons to mentoring work

We invite you to reflect on these findings by considering which elements already show up in your mentoring work and which feel hardest to sustain. We also encourage teams to consider how these mentee, mentor, and practitioner insights might inform more impactful mentorship experiences for your students, and how the model may continue to be adapted to rural contexts. The worksheet included in Data Note 3 offers a starting point for this kind of reflection and discussion.

Read the full publication!

Charting Practices and Critical Mentorship Strategies for Rural Community College Students

Mentoring is a powerful tool for enhancing student persistence and success, especially for students who face greater entrenched systematic injustice in higher education. This is particularly important for rural students, who combined with the challenges faced by community college students, represent a group often underserved by traditional mentorship programs. In our second data note of the Mapping Effective Mentorship for Rural Community College Students project, we highlight mentorship programs and practices at rural-serving community colleges (RSCCs) that can support student success and address the systemic inequities they face in achieving their goals. We invite you to reflect on these findings and how your institution can apply these insights to create more impactful mentorship experiences for your students. Read Data Note 2 and join the conversation on how we can strengthen mentorship for rural community college students.

Why this Data Note Matters

Rural-community colleges are a key points of entry to paths toward greater economic security and choice for minoritized populations, yet high-impact mentoring programs informed by and specific to this unique role and their distinct rural contexts are sparse. This data note provides actionable strategies and considerations for practitioners to strengthen mentorship programs for rural community college students at their colleges.

Key Insights

Building Empowering and Inclusive Mentorship Spaces: Learn how mentorship programs at RSCCs strive to create a safe and inclusive environment that can foster student reflection, agency, and advocacy to challenge the power structures they encounter in higher education and beyond.
Cultural Identity and Community Engagement in Mentorship: Explore how mentorship programs are embracing students’ cultural identities. These protective practices can amplify students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), which can buffer students from the exclusive power structures encountered in higher education and enhance persistence and overall goal attainment.

Additionally, we invite you to share our survey below with students who receive mentorship to help us further understand how we can enhance mentorship strategies and better support rural students. Please click here to learn more about our student survey.

Click here to read the full data note.

Unlocking STEM Potential: How Partnerships are Bridging the Transfer Gap

Imagine a future where talented science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students from low-income backgrounds have a clear and supported pathway from their community college to a 4-year university to complete their bachelor’s degree in their chosen major. This vision is becoming a reality thanks to innovative partnerships between 2-year and 4-year institutions.

The STEM Transfer Partnership began with nine teams composed of 2-year and 4-year institutional partners. These teams have been working collaboratively to increase access to and bachelor’s degree completion for STEM transfer students from low-income backgrounds. These partnerships were formed towards the end of the COVID pandemic, as institutions were readjusting to a new normal and returning to campus with fewer students and, thus, fewer resources. During this challenging time, faculty, staff and administrators faced many demands on their time and attention. We are grateful these teams chose to focus on improving their transfer students’ experiences by growing their partnerships, building relationships, and creating solutions.

Data Note 5 from the STEM Transfer Partnerships (STP) initiative unveils the power of collaboration by sharing case studies of nine dedicated teams. The teams who collectively comprise the STP community of practice are composed of faculty, staff, and administrators working together to break down the barriers that often hinder the transfer and completion rates of STEM students from low-income backgrounds.

Discover how these partnerships are:

Improving advising: Streamlining guidance, fostering personalized support, and creating clear pathways to success.
Enhancing recruitment and enrollment: Inspiring student interest, increasing access to opportunities, and simplifying the transfer process.
Strengthening faculty and curriculum: Improving gateway course outcomes, promoting research experiences, and providing courses to be major ready to transfer.

This Data Note showcases examples from this community of practice’s partnerships. Some of the exciting things you will see in these case studies are the myriad ways teams changed practices and processes to improve transfer student experiences. All teams utilized student input in their change process.

Key takeaways from across these case studies highlight the importance to:

- Build relationships
- Center transfer student input in the process
- Use data to monitor and improve outcomes
- Tie efforts to other institutional resources with similar goals
- Get leadership involved

This publication, co-created with our team leads, provides valuable insights for educators, administrators, and policymakers seeking to improve STEM transfer rates and empower the next generation of scientists and innovators.

Read the full brief to learn more about the strategies and successes of these impactful partnerships.

Examining Gaps in Supporting Underserved Community College Students

Within CCRI’s research, we recognize the unique challenges faced by students from marginalized backgrounds, particularly those belonging to communities of color, who form a significant portion of our community college demographic. Our exploration of data and historical trends reveals that due to a persistent lack of clarity in transfer pathways in STEM majors, these students may not be prepared to apply for their preferred university or major.

Given the ever-expanding nature of STEM disciplines and the increasing competitiveness among students, it is imperative that we develop a strategic plan of action. Our focus is on establishing and enhancing partnerships specifically tailored to address the needs of disproportionately marginalized students. Throughout our research, we emphasize resource equity and access to fortify our support framework for these students. As we diversify the conversations of how to approach providing these resources and support systems, we encourage you to read our findings which may be accessed here.

Prioritizing Racial Equity in Research

CCRI’s work in transfer is guided by our commitment to center racial equity and anti-racist strategies to support and transform policies and systems that historically and presently oppress our student population into ones that equitably enhance their growth and development in our institutions. Our transfer research presents evidence that such problems continue to persist within higher institutions to this day, despite ongoing efforts and progress towards education reform.

Ongoing studies on transfer students consistently reveal a higher influence of demographic factors impacting their experience compared to other institutional aspects.In our research, we focus on examining the specific challenges faced by students of color, seeking to understand why they disproportionately encounter adversity in their postsecondary journey. Our goal is to develop solutions that extend beyond college, addressing the issue of limited access to higher education. The onus is on institutions to actively dismantle these barriers and delve deeper into understanding the various impacts on students throughout the transfer process. CCRI remains committed to generating actionable research that contributes to leveling the educational playing field for all students of color.

Learn more about our research in this area:

Read Transfer Data Note 2: Including Racial Equity as an Outcome Measure in Transfer Research

This brief finds that higher-performing transfer partnerships were almost exclusively institutional pairs with high percentages of White students, none of the institutional pairs revealed equitable outcomes for transfer students of color compared to White transfer students.

Read Transfer Data Note 10: Identifying Effective and Equitable Institutions for Transfer Students: Exploring the Contribution of the Pair in Multilevel Models

Using multilevel modeling, in this brief we examine how two- and four-year institutions working in relationship with each other reveal outcomes for African American and Latinx students within the transfer process.

Bridging the Rural Mentorship Gap: A Data Note on Mentorship Programs in Rural Community Colleges

A recent data note, the first in a series, published by the Community College Research Initiatives and generously funded by the Ascendium Education Group as part of its Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success initiative, examines mentorship programs at public 2-year rural-serving institutions (RSIs). Using institutional website data, it explores the prevalence, distribution, and focus of mentorship programs, shedding light on who these programs serve and the variations across states.

The findings highlight an asymmetry in the distribution and location of mentorship programs across 444 public 2-year RSIs. While 301 of the 444 RSIs had at least one mentorship program, the number of programs ranged from one to eight per institution. A large proportion of mentorship programs lacked an explicit focus on underrepresented student groups. Approximately 3 out of 10 programs (29%) explicitly targeted low-income students, and 10 percent of programs targeted specific racial/ethnic student groups in their program descriptions. The analysis also found that many website descriptions did not provide clear information on who was providing the mentoring and how mentorship was defined.

These findings inform our future questions:

Mentorship: How is mentorship defined, and who is providing the mentoring? What structures are embedded within mentorship programs that support the success of rural community college students?
Rural Student Experience: How do mentorship programs impact the academic and career outcomes of rural community college students?
Intersectionality: How do mentorship experiences align with rural students’ evolving needs and intersectional identities, including low-income and racially minoritized students?
Best Practices: What best practices can be identified to inform mentoring models that are adaptable and tailored across institutions to support the success of rural community college students? How can programs better cater to the unique needs of students residing in rural communities? How does rurality play a role in program design and implementation?

In the next phase of this research, CCRI is exploring these questions through in-depth interviews with staff and student support practitioners, focus groups with students, and a national student survey. The “Landscape of Mentorship Programs at Rural Serving Community Colleges” data note serves as a starting point for understanding the availability of mentorship programs across public 2-year RSIs. As this research progresses, the insights this work provides will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of mentorship in rural settings, guide the development of inclusive and effective mentorship programs for rural students, and work towards bridging critical gaps in serving historically underserved students at RSIs.

NTSW: Overcoming the Turbulent Period of COVID-19 Through CCRI Student Support

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With Transfer being one of the most understudied yet most frequently occuring phenomena in higher education, it is important to recognize the functions at play involving societal inequities that continually contribute to adversities transfer students face. Considering transfer students already deal with intense adjustments depending on the institutions they come from (i.e. new requirements, new social communities, and completely readjusting their own approach to participation in contrasting cultural even linguistic circumstances), providing students with adequate connections, staffing support, and guidance becomes a much-needed tool in their tool kit for success.

Attending to student needs, overall, has taken a massive shift since the pandemic. Being a transfer student during this time poses a unique challenge of navigating two big transitions as they adapt to a new institution. One is the online learning environment and adjusting to regulations and rules that continue to change, and one is related to returning to the “normal” standards of the school (something students are unaccustomed to because of the pandemic’s influence).

The CCRI team sought to raise awareness on transfer student needs during this time. Our researchers, Debra Bragg, Lia Wetzstein, Elizabeth Apple Meza, & Theresa (Ling) Yeh analyzed different methodologies to support students and bolster their success during this unstable period. Read more about this in Data Note 11 of the Transfer Partnership Series.

Listening to Students: New Data Note on Getting Student Input

As STP teams have been working on action plans to expand STEM equity at their institutions, CCRI has documented the process of their efforts through a variety of data collection efforts, including participant observation in coaching sessions and convenings, surveys, and interviews. Analysis of this data reveals the challenges and creative innovations embedded in the process of developing a plan for student input and turning that input into student-centered programs and process improvements. The most recent data note 3 shares findings about the iterative process of developing these plans, as teams use both formal and informal learning from students to inform and refine subsequent efforts. We find that teams are thinking creatively not only about how to get student input but also what defines input and how to interpret and apply what they learn from students.

A common experience for STP teams in the initial period of the program was grappling with how to define student input. Many of the STP participants have years, if not decades, of experience working with students in the STEM pathway, but does that experiential knowledge constitute data? Similarly, many participants were learning from students informally at events and in classroom settings but wondered how to synthesize and interpret those informal interactions. One of the key lessons of the first half of the program was that experiential knowledge and informal feedback from students matter a great deal in the action research process. Teams tuned into this information and used it as the basis for initial student engagement events as well as to inform more systematic data collection efforts for student input.

Teams are also thinking outside the box about collecting student input, often combining student engagement with gathering input. Teams hosted hands-on events like building rockets and soldering hearts while also cultivating feedback through conversation, focus groups, and/or exit surveys. Most importantly, teams are not relying exclusively on one stream of student feedback or input but, rather, combining multiple methodologies, both formal and informal, to develop a robust understanding of the student experience and to inform improvements in STEM education and transfer.

Overall, what we learned in this analysis is that STP teams are thinking creatively to develop new strategies for student input, focusing on student engagement in combination with data collection efforts. Each step of the process informs the next, working holistically with both formal and informal information sources. Ultimately, this approach results in interventions and process improvements that are sensitive to the students in a particular context, providing students with the resources and supports they need.

Transformative partnership praxis for equitable STEM transfer

As the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) program approaches the one-year mark, we are able to reflect on the strategies for success that our two-year and four-year institutional partners have developed in their work to advance their partnerships and increase STEM transfer success for low income students. In our second data note on the STP program, we describe the ways STP partnership teams are dismantling barriers through networks of transformative partnership praxis, building multi-layered and flexibly structured communities.

Over the course of 12 months, CCRI has supported the progress of STP teams and their plans of action aimed at improving STEM transfer for students at their institutions. Teams have engaged in two full-community gatherings as well as monthly coaching sessions. Throughout, CCRI has collected data on their experiences through participant observation, survey, and document analysis. Examining this data, we find that teams often experience similar barriers in their efforts to implement systemic change in STEM transfer processes, most notably low-income student recruitment and long term program sustainability. In our recent data note, we look at how partnering institutions respond to these challenges. We find that taking steps toward institutional transformation requires participants to build flexible and multi-layered communities, networks that draw upon resources and expertise from beyond the team membership.

At this intermediate stage of the program, many STP teams are working on the big problems that make the work of expanding STEM access and supporting transfer students so challenging. One central challenge is the question of how to recruit students from low-income backgrounds to STEM fields and how best to support them through transfer and degree completion. What are the best ways to reach out to these students in the early years of their college education? How can support programs engage these students as they juggle the competing priorities of school, family, and work schedules? In tackling these questions, teams are often prompted to expand the boundaries of their networks of praxis, connecting with programs such as TRIO and MESA that have a well-established set of strategies for engaging and supporting low-income students. Rather than trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as several participants phrased it, teams are joining forces with partners across their institutions in collaborations that benefit low-income students in many ways. Teams are also extending their networks to engage institutional leaders, finding ways to engage college and university administrators in ways that broaden the impact of their work.

STP teams are not limiting their outreach to their respective institutions but, rather, reaching beyond the college and university of their partnership to include not only other institutions but also policymakers, students and families, and professional networks. The STP program is designed to embed the work of partnerships within a community of practice, invested professionals committed to interventions to improve STEM transfer. The purpose of the biannual convenings is to foster cross-community collaboration and learning. The most recent data note describes how these kinds of connections are helping teams identify resources and solve complex problems. As they look to the future to map out a plan for long term sustainability, they draw upon ideas from other teams, using those ideas to connect with policymakers, industry partners, and others in ways that support programs and interventions that will continue to improve STEM transfer success beyond the life of the STP grant.

Each reconfiguration and expansion of community creates new opportunities for equitable STEM access. While the data reported here demonstrate how networks of praxis support problem solving for STP teams, the impact of expanding the community goes beyond finding solutions to specific problems. Teams are learning new skills, developing new partnerships, and incorporating new resources into their work in ways that create benefits for the college and university beyond STEM programs.