As Gustavus Adolphus College builds momentum in our newly-invigorated journey toward first-generation student success, our first year of membership in the FirstGeneration Forward Network [FGFN] has already provided invaluable insights from amazing and accomplished peers across the nation. Yet some of our most relevant collaborators may be those much closer to home. Recently, Gustavus Adolphus College joined Carleton College, Hamline University, and St. Olaf College–all fellow members of the Minnesota Private College Council who are also participants in the FGFN–for a virtual summit. There, we shared resources and strategies to help our first-gen students capture their full potential. This local connection allowed for a deep dive into shared institutional experiences.
As a co-organizer of the summit, Gustavus’ Interim Vice President for Community & Belonging Tom Flunker set sights on some particular outcomes, including building relationships with staff at each institution and learning more about the successes and challenges others have faced. He also carried high hopes that this would be the first of many future opportunities to connect and collaborate with our FGFN colleagues at neighboring institutions.
A Blueprint for Transparency
To ensure the summit was productive for everyone involved, we polled participants beforehand to align the agenda with their specific interests. The resulting conversation focused on three areas: institutional structures, support throughout the student lifecycle (academic, social, financial, and career), and the use of data to improve student outcomes.
Each institution contributed to a shared document outlining their current initiatives and areas for growth. This provided a transparent peek into the inner workings of each campus and created a permanent reference tool for future collaboration. This structure encouraged participants to be frank about their progress and their aspirations for strengthening institutional support.
Institutional Strengths and Shared Goals
The summit highlighted how different resources can achieve similar goals of academic success, visibility, and belonging. Two participating institutions have utilized federal TRIO grant programs for over two decades to establish robust academic supports and designated physical spaces. One participant has only recently acquired TRIO resources, and the fourth has not yet pursued a grant. This represents just one of many ways that even a small group such as this can reflect a variety of approaches to institutionalizing first-gen support.
The participants discussed a wide range of techniques and strategies they have used to good effect in their work, ranging from proactive advising to social events to high engagement with students’ families. The use of an online directory featuring first-generation faculty and staff particularly piqued the interest of the Gustavus representatives. This tool normalizes a first-generation identity and provides students with visible models of success as well as specific allies on campus they might seek out for connection.
Data and its uses provided a prominent point of pre-summit interest and received significant attention in our discussion. Despite our varying levels of experience and success with data collection and utilization, every institution expressed a common goal: learning to deploy institutional data more effectively to identify and remove systemic barriers to student success.
Gustavus Student Support Specialist Mary Hellwege reflected on the intersection of some important themes. “While we develop specific data-informed and proactive initiatives that will address systems and support across campus,” she said, “I would also like to lean into the role of identity: how can we help our students explore how first-gen identity can add value and meaning to their engagement on campus and their endeavors in and beyond college.”
Advice for Local Collaboration
The sheer breadth of the full FGFN membership, representing over 470 colleges and universities from every corner of the nation, offers an irreplaceable resource for newly-joined institutions (like Gustavus) seeking to gain a foothold in our first-gen support and advocacy work. Still, the circumstances surrounding this work can vary widely from one corner of the nation to the next, an insight reflected in the wisdom of FGFN’s regional groupings and biannual gatherings. We found enormous upside to drilling a little deeper into those regional connections, and we are optimistic that our Minnesota “mini-network” will be an excellent complement to our investment in the FGFN at large.
Erin Kuiper, Gustavus’ Student Employment and Vocation Program Manager, reflected that the summit “brought a sense of shared purpose and mission to those in attendance from all schools. The time spent together discussing the work these colleges have been doing (some of them for decades) provided some great vision for where we could go with the work we need to do.”
For institutions looking to build their own local connections within the FirstGen Forward Network, we recommend two specific strategies:
•Co-create the Agenda: Soliciting input early ensures that the meeting provides value to every participant, regardless of where their institution is in its first-generation support journey.
•Use Shared Documentation: Writing out institutional details beforehand saves time during the meeting and builds a foundation of trust and transparency.
While Gustavus is in the earlier stages of formalizing institutionalized support, we were inspired by the work of our neighbors. The enthusiasm for future resource-sharing remains high among all the participating institutions, and we look forward to maintaining these important local connections.
