Since 2004, Achieving the Dream (ATD) – a national, nonprofit leading organization that has helped more than 4 million community college students achieve academic success and close opportunity gaps – will hold its 15th annual DREAM convening in Long Beach, CA from Feb. 19-22.
The annual DREAM conference unites over 2,000 college practitioners, investors, policymakers and thought leaders around the nation to discuss important issues such as expanding student success, equity, student poverty, hunger and homelessness and student-focused decision-making.
DREAM 2019 is available to colleges and universities regardless of whether an institution is a part of the Achieving the Dream Network.
The conference “really covers the whole gamut of what community colleges should be doing to holistically support their students,” said Bonita J. Brown, vice president for network engagement at ATD and lead organizer of DREAM.
Achieving the Dream will host a variety of spotlight sessions, plenaries and over a hundred of interactive workshop and sessions that will allow conference participants to share their best practices and network informally with speakers and colleagues during receptions and other events.
For this year’s convening, DREAM will host a day-long interactive Equity Institute before the conference begins, where institutional teams will participate in learning opportunities and activities to help create a more in-depth understanding of what equity means, what it looks like in practice and how it is demonstrated on campuses.
During the Equity Institute pre-conference workshops, ATD will host a couple of speakers, but then will break the participants up into teams. Once the teams have been established, they will “develop equity plans for their campus, a scorecard, they will practice drafting equity statements and what words, they’re going to look at vision statements and what equity vision statements could and should look like,” Brown said.
