Developing Inclusive Leadership Practices for Residence Hall Students to Promote Resilient Communities

• In Event: Innovative Applications of Inclusive Leadership Theory

Short Description

This university, like many others, has expanded counseling and health services to better serve the increased numbers of college students with mental health issues. However, gaps remain. This paper examines how inclusive leadership theory offers a creative solution, exploring the literature supporting this phenomenon and offering a proposal for systemic implementation.

Detailed Abstract

University housing departments on college campuses are in a unique position as they have access to many students in a way that their campus partners do not. There has been an increase of college students with mental health issues nationwide (Zivin et al., 2008). Our institution has been adapting to this increase with creative outreach strategies and expanding counseling and health services. With this said, over 90% of the first-year students live and learn on our campus so many of these mental health concerns emerge through and beyond the typical issues students experience in the residence halls.

We have employed a couple of new creative strategies to support this population of students such as the implementation of confidential “care” reports that professional staff use to track the support of students of concern. We also have a series of academic interventions during winter quarter for students with a GPA under 2.0 after their first quarter. Through these interventions, we have found several students who have needs beyond our capacity that we can refer to appropriate on-campus resources.

While these strategies have been helpful, I think we need to build an additional level of support into the theoretical foundation of our infrastructure. I think the inclusive leadership theory would serve this need. Bourke and Dillon (2016) have identified a set of six signature traits to promote “thriving in a diverse new world”. The authors identified commitment, courage, cognizance of bias, curiosity, cultural intelligence and collaboration as qualities that promote the elements of inclusion which are: fairness and respect, value and belonging, and confidence and inspiration. Incorporating this theoretical model into our existing infrastructure would promote resilience and thriving across several demographics, meeting the needs of many versus a few. This paper will explore the literature supporting this phenomenon and create an overview of how this might be implemented that can be proposed to administrators for systemic implementation.

Participant

• Holly Diaz, Western Washington University