Success by Design: Activating Hearts, Hands, and Minds to Develop a Male Success Initiative at Long Beach City College

Abstract

Higher Education has long been positioned as a viable vehicle to economic prosperity and insulating factor against crime and violence among traditionally underserved minoritized populations. However, commonly used school success metrics such as course completion, persistence, and degree attainment demonstrate inequitable success rates among many student subgroups, including men of color (MOC). For this reason, many institutions of higher education (IHE) have enacted targeted support services commonly referred to as male success initiatives (MSI). Due to many confounding factors, the community college is the most common destination for minoritized students in California, with 62% of all Black, and 82% of Black male college students starting their higher education journey at a 2-year institution (Harris & Wood, 2015). This capstone explores the process of developing and piloting an MSI at Long Beach City College grounded in Design Thinking and Dr. J. Luke Wood and Dr. Frank Harris III’s (2014) Five Domains: A Conceptual Model of Black Male Success in Community College. The goal was to enact an initiative that supports MOC success through multiple lenses by providing direct student services while cultivating equity-mindedness and encouraging change in institutional policy and culture. Driving towards equitable outcomes requires will, skill, and action. Working collaboratively to enact high-quality programing and cultivating equity-mindedness among educators must both be explicit goals. By holding the complexity of simultaneously being part of the solution and the problem, we can adopt new mental models and catalyze change to truly impact gaps in MOC student achievement.