Blog Post 2: Building Your Sustainability Team

Burnout. Stress. Meeting fatigue. Exhaustion. Given current context, you may be hesitant to build or reconvene a sustainability team. However, planning for sustainability is essential—and you can’t do it alone. If you are just beginning this work, set yourself up for success by attending to team composition and structure. If you already have a sustainability team, now is a great time to consider changes that may be needed for the upcoming year.

The sustainability team is a group of individuals focused on developing and implementing a comprehensive plan during their grant implementation to ensure the long-term program success program once funding ends. Each sustainability team looks different based on the grantee institution and local context. However, there are some key features that are relevant to every sustainability team. For example, the team should include key internal staff, including finance, research and data, and program staff. The team should also include representatives from key stakeholders, partners, and community members. When building your team, it’s critical to find people who not only have expertise and skills to support planning but also the commitment, influence, and varied perspectives needed to make planning successful.

Why is a multi-stakeholder team critical? Because if the whole system is not represented in your planning team, you may miss important connections or have unintended consequences because balanced perspectives were not represented in the team planning.

Internal Staff

• Program Director/Program Manager
• Research and Data staff
• Program evaluators
• Financial or cost analysis
• Strategically chosen colleague from a different office or department

Potential Partners

• District Partners, including educators
• Institutes of higher education and other educator preparation programs
• Educator unions
• K-12 high school student
• Student teacher
• State legislators

Key Considerations

• Expertise and skills
• Commitment
• Influence
• Perspective and lived experiences

Here are some additional considerations as you recruit and convene your sustainability team:

1. Who can bring expertise, commitment, influence, and varied perspectives to the team? There is no perfect team, but the Creating Your Team: Mapping Exercise can help you identify the strengths and gaps in your potential team.
2. What is the focus of the group? The group should focus on the initial 6-12 months before building out further the sustainability plan. Completing and discussing the Sustainability Self-Assessment Tool can help the group identify current strengths and gaps within a multifocal approach to sustainability that includes solidifying partnerships and stakeholder engagement, scale up and sustainment of effort, calculating return on investment, and ensuring ongoing financial support.
3. When will the team meetings take place? Be up front with all potential members about the time commitment, and make sure that everyone can commit; ideally, have a standing meeting time so people can block their calendars. It may be that you have a core team that meets weekly, but then you have another group that provides targeted expertise as needed.
4. Where will you meet? If meeting virtually, with which platform are people most comfortable? How will you ensure all participants are engaged and have a voice in the discussion?
5. What structures will you establish (e.g. norms, agendas, notetaking space, protocols) to ensure meetings are productive?
6. How will you engage with sustainability team members outside of meetings? These engagements provide an opportunity to ensure team members feel valued and connected to the work.

Finally, make sure everyone has a shared understanding of the why: sustainability requires system change, and it takes a team to ensure the long-term success of any initiative or program.

Have you already formed your sustainability team? Trying a new way to recruit and engage your sustainability team? We want to hear how about it! Contact us at eed-ta@aemcorp.com and we will plan to share some of your progress and thinking at an upcoming engagement opportunity.