Spring 2023 CHAS Professional Development Meeting
(Re)Defining Our Leadership: Cultivating a Community of Care
A CHAS Professional Meeting at Vassar College, April 27th & 28th
Students thrive when their supporters are flourishing. This CHAS professional development meeting will bring together professionals who sustain and support students from marginalized communities at an extremely challenging time in the history of higher education. At this convening, we discussed avenues for cultivating a community of care in which we can lean on one another and also feel empowered to embrace self-care, with the aim of developing impactful strategies for sustainable leadership.
Scholar Michele Tugade delivered a keynote on resilience. Dr. Tugade is Professor in the Department of Psychological Science at Vassar College, where she directs the Affective Science Laboratory. Her research focuses on the function of positive emotions in the coping process, the mechanisms that promote resilience in the face of stress and adversity, and emotion-related processes associated with health and well-being.
Professor Tugade is dedicated to sharing her research with the broader community through public lectures and workshops on mental health, well-being, education, and women’s leadership. She has worked with a number of organizations, including NASA, Apple, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and The United Way. Sharing her work more globally, she has taught medical students at the University of Global Health Equity (Rwanda, Africa). Her research has been featured in various media outlets, including NPR, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Psychology Today, CNBC, and others. You can learn more about her research through her many published articles and her edited volume, the Handbook of Positive Emotions.
Friday’s opening remarks were delivered by Kimberly Williams Brown, co-founder and director of the Intergroup Dialogue Collective, a non-profit that uses intergroup dialogue praxis to engage in critical conversations about race and racism. A former student affairs administrator, she is currently an assistant professor at Vassar College in Education, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of race, gender and migration. She has co-written two books, “Rise for Racial Justice: How to Talk About Race with Schools and Communities” (with Colette Cann and Meredith Madden) and the forthcoming “Say, Listen: Writing as Care” (by the Black | Indigenous 100s Collective).