Driving Equity 2030, the Brown School’s 10-year strategic plan, is only a little more than a year old, but it’s already making early progress, according to updates from the plan’s leaders. The progress report takes stock of early achievements in the plan’s four core commitments and four strategic priorities.
The plan’s first year has largely been focused on creating building blocks for its goals, identifying metrics for measuring progress, and creating ways to track its implementation, according to Jacqueline Martinez Pullen, associate dean for strategic initiatives & chief of staff. “Even though we’re at the beginning of implementing the plan, we’ve made significant strides,” said Pullen, who worked on the updates with the plan’s faculty and staff leaders.
Driving Equity was initially released in January 2020, but was paused when COVID hit and then revised to take the pandemic into account before a rollout in August 2021. Many of the goals, such as data science and technology, are linked to the university’s own strategic plan. Some concrete steps are already being taken, such as two endowed professorships (Brett Drake and Doug Luke), a program in artificial intelligence (Ruopeng An) and the creation of the position of data analytics officer (Jenine Harris).
Setting goals and methods for strengthening transdisciplinary research, long a hallmark of the Brown School, is another key strategic goal aligned with the university. “We’re looking at how we continue making sure were working across disciplines and figuring out the landscape of who’s working on what,” Pullen said.
“This is just the first of many progress updates,” she added. “It’s our way of communicating we are making progress. We want people to have an update in bite-sized pieces of just some of the things that we are implementing to reach our goals and objectives.”