Strategic Priorities & Goals

Aerial image of campus, showing buildings from high above.

Student Life Strategic Priorities And Goals For 2022-23 

 

Diversity, Equity And Inclusion

Our DEI Priorities and Goals outline a plan for Student Life to meet student and organizational needs through divisional efforts devoted to building a more diverse, equitable and inclusive campus environment. Student Life's 2022-23 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals are focused on improved support for and development of staff, increased student engagement in and strengthening of educational programming in alignment with the campus-wide DEI Strategic Plan. 

 

Goals: 

  1. Integrate Student Life's hiring and onboarding best practices across all units. 

  2. Identify a centralized model of tailored support for units to build the skills needed to lead in our DEI work and to grow in our SL DEI core competencies. 

  3. Develop a sustainable model for regular engagement with student boards, leadership groups, and organizations to identify and assess campus climate needs and for the sharing of ideas, information, actions, and impacts 

  4. Assess our internal DEI structure and affirm a structure that maximizes our divisional resources to meet our needs. 

 

 

Health, Wellbeing And Harm Reduction

Living into our aspiration of becoming a health-promoting campus requires strategic and intentional divisional and institutional partnerships.  The public health approach provides us with a holistic and comprehensive framework to proactively create health and wellbeing while effectively reducing harm and responding to it when it occurs. The current environment reminds us and highlights the importance of equitable access to health care and wellbeing.

 

Goals: 

  1. Create Sexual Misconduct Prevention Strategic Plan with PEAR for population level sexual misconduct prevention 

  2. Implement recommendations and communication plan for the Student Mental Health Taskforce and work team efforts.

  3. Continue evaluation of student organizational accountability through partnership between FSL, CCI, and OSCR.

  4. Finalize plans for CCRB Replacement Project, plan and build temporary recreation space, and begin construction.

  5. Implement the Health and Wellness Collective Impact framework now expanded to be institution-wide.

 

 

Integrated Partnerships

Working on a shared agenda in partnership within our divisional and institutional colleagues is more critical than ever.  Our current fiscal realities as well as complex student needs related to the pandemic and the national climate amplify the need for partnership and synergy. Sustained and new partnerships create efficiencies, share knowledge and expertise, coordinate institutional communication and messaging, and enrich the student experience.  

 

Goals: 

  1. Continue to reinforce partnership culture in order to maximize resource allocation, unit synergies, and  academic collaborations

  2. Deliver biennial partnership inventory and report 

  3. Include partnerships philosophy and work in ongoing professional development and onboarding efforts

  4. Continue to invest in Project Management infrastructure to deliver our shared work and priorities

  5. Focus on prioritization in order to streamline and focus unit and divisional efforts

 

 

Adaptable And Inclusive Talent Management  

It is critical to continue making intentional, division-wide decisions about workforce planning and hiring to support our campus community.  We will need to remain adaptable and nimble in response to the university, and an ever evolving environment, as well as the national climate related to racial justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Student Life will continue identifying and developing staff focused DEI strategic work and practices.  Our primary goal is to leverage the immense talent of our staff and be adaptable to the needs of Student Life and the University of Michigan, while recognizing that we are still in a recovering and uncertain financial environment.  Furthermore, it will be critical to continue to develop thoughtful and appropriate plans for staff working arrangements.

 

Goals: 

  1. Evaluate and assess turnover and compensation impact

  2. Identify opportunities for creative staffing (regular and student) models that support retention/recruitment

  3. Continue/refine guidelines for 'future of the workplace' model

  4. Intentionally cross train/grow team members to maintain core work while also developing employee skills

 

 

Understanding Our Work, Determining Our Impact, Telling Our Stories 

We have built systems that allow us to gather data from our units.  We are also now able to connect student’s experiences within Student Life with their self-reported achievement of our learning outcomes. In short, we can now demonstrate our impact in an evidence-based manner and this year's goals build mechanisms to disseminate those stories in a visually compelling, accessible way.  

 

Goals: 

  1. Tell evidence-based stories of impact through a student lens (as opposed to through the Student Life lens)

  2. Maximize the partnership of the Directors of Research, Strategic Communications, Strategic Priorities, and Organizational Development in service of telling these stories internally and externally

  3. Pilot the new student engagement app – Wolverine LIfe – and evaluate its impact among new first-year and transfer students 

  4. Make available a set of text/images that can be used to share and demonstrate impact of our divisional core work

  5. Rebrand and rebuild Student Life web landing page in advance of full website redevelopment

  6. Create initial divisional social media strategy

  7. Ensure the quality of divisional data through a pilot test of a data governance process with selected Student LIfe units (implementation across the division will occur beginning 23-24)