Good afternoon, my name is Adrienne Smith and I'm going to talk to you about asset mapping.
This is a presentation that's been prepared by myself and my colleague, Dr. Rebecca Zulli Lowe.
We are social science researchers and evaluators and we often partner with universities
and community colleges to help them as they sort of strategize how they are going to go about
broadening participation within their department or institution.
And asset mapping, we find, is just been
a really excellent tool for beginning conversations that are asset focused
instead of the deficit mindset that we so often see.
Really they changed the conversation from what's lacking or what's missing about our institution
and what's missing about the students that we're trying to serve and instead
people are getting excited and engaged and they're thinking more about what
they have and they're thinking more about how they can see opportunities and
they're seeing them and they're being motivated and it kind of creates a lot
of self-sustaining momentum for those conversations.
So what is asset mapping?
Well it's a process of documenting the people and resources
that are available within a community that support or enhance a specific goal.
So it's documenting those resources that exist within a community or ecosystem
There are lots of different uses for an asset map.
In fact, as we do this work we continue to find more uses for asset mapping even though our original
intention was to think about it as an evaluation tool and a tracking tool,
but it can be used as a resource map for students or faculty members who are
working on broadening participation within their courses.
It can be a referral resource whenever some barriers are encountered that so people can find
and access those resources quickly, a recruiting tool to show people how the
environment has created and has supports, and also as a tool for strategic
planning and we've really seen some advances in that area.
So what do I mean by our assets?
Well, the first step that we think about with asset mapping is to start thinking broadly
and to do that we have categories that we help people just
sort of a start in their thinking about what assets exist in their institution
and really in their environment because industry partners, community partners, are
part of that too.
Those categories of assets, these are the ones we've come up
with for STEM, but we know as we engage more and more and talking about
data science and environmental science those categories are going to broaden
and so that'll just continue to provide the next group of people
with those categories to start with as their inventory, their assets.
Now in this particular diagram I have at the center the focus being an underrepresented
student in STEM but you could think about this the same way about resources
and assets for a STEM instructor.
[pause]
The second step in asset mapping is to start mapping and so we try to give
people tips on how to go about doing this again, to try to be thinking really
broadly about their institution and their community.
So the first thing we do is say, "Please jot down the places in which you refer students or faculty or colleagues."
Think about your known collaborations, your known partnerships,
and then ask those people who else is doing this kind of work?
Who else is trying to build these kinds of supports?
Printing out a campus map and just identifying what other organizations have a similar mission.
Internet searches looking at the university directories.
All are different ways in which people can start to identify assets.
[pause]
The next step, and again, we sort of have paired this down into some real
concrete steps for just getting started, but you really want to think about how
those assets should be displayed on your asset map and that should be tailored
specifically to your audience and what will they need when they look at that asset map.
Whether it be a planning committee or a student, what information
will they need and how will they access that information so that they can take
advantage of the map and the resources that exist?
[pause]
Finally, we can use asset mapping for tracking so a lot of people are focused
on these efforts to build influence and to create these supportive environments
but they need to have ways in which to track how that progress is being made
and asset maps are a great way to do that.
You can track the identification of assets, the relationship with those assets,
the directionality between those assets
So asset mapping is a wonderful tool for being able to show your
progress and for strategizing about what the next steps will be.
So we have a little bit of information on the table that just has just an overview of kind of
asset mapping and some other tools that will be helpful for
getting conversation started to broaden participation at universities.
Thank you.
[clapping]