For the third year in a row, the United Negro College Fund will hold its Career Pathways Initiative Annual Convening & Data Institute, bringing together data industry experts and faculty, staff and executive leadership from more than 40 historically Black institutions this month in Fort Lauderdale.
With a goal to build a community of practice, the convening and data institute from July 23-25 will leverage individuals’ and institutions’ knowledge on technology-driven best practices in order for CPI’s partnering institutions to collaborate and set strategic agendas to usher their students into the 21st-century workforce with viable skills and experiences.
CPI’s three-prong approach to their work on improving students’ career outcomes – promoting guided pathways, enhancing curriculum and integrating co-curricular engagement – will be at the root of this year’s theme, “Purposeful Disruption.”
“We are really intent on institutions understanding the needs of their current space and then disrupting the current practice,” said Edward Smith-Lewis, director of the UNCF Career Pathways Initiative. “Purposeful disruption has less to do with the nice, shiny objects or the technology that’s being promoted in higher ed. It has much more to do with the intentionality of changing culture and changing practice on campus.”
Smith-Lewis added that, in order for institutions to commit to this work, data must inform their decisions.
“We can’t change what we don’t know … data is crucial to that,” he said.
The CPI convening aims to uplift institutions and will showcase in 90-minute concurrent sessions some of the innovative “disruptions” – or “purposeful disruptors” as Smith-Lewis calls them – that HBCUs have implemented on their campuses.
