Collaboration and Networking Opportunities!

Hi all,

I have two exciting new professional development and networking opportunities to share this week.
SUNY WIT doesn't need to recreate everything, since there are wonderful resources available to us already.

COA Collaboration Community:

The first is a collaboration with COA spearheaded by Jennifer Webb (ESF) and enthusiastically supported by COA (Krystal Perlman (Brockport), Deb McClenon (Oneonta), Kris Lynch (SUNY CPD), and Adam Weisblatt (Upstate).

They've agreed to include SUNY WIT in the COA Collaboration Community, with monthly conversations from 9am to 10am on the first Wednesday from Wednesday, Mar 5 to Thursday, May 8 (Eastern Time - New York)!
Next week! March 5th is the launch, so put this on your schedule now!

So join COA, and sign up for WIT conversations, and get access to another way to learn, engage, and connect!

• Join the COA-L List: If you’re not yet a SUNY COA Member, Sign-Up as a Member and they will add you to the COA Listserv.
• Join the SUNY COA MS Team: Email Deb.McClenon@oneonta.edu to be added to the SUNY COA MS Team.

EDUCAUSE Women in Technology Community Group Slack Book Club:

A new semester-long asynchronous book club you can join (no EDUCAUSE sign in needed) by connecting to the Slack channel and participating as your time and interest allows.

The first book is Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. Book Club facilitator Cristy L. Wentz (Hamilton College) writes:

"As you may already know, Mel Robbins is a superstar. A massive following, a 2025 tour across the US and UK, a podcast with over 200 episodes, and public speaking engagements. From 'rock bottom' to inspiring and motivating millions, her book is transformative."

The Slack channel has links to the online Mel Robbins podcasts, tips on where/how to access the book, and a loose schedule for the spring semester to help guide the conversations. I hope to see some of you online.

Join the EDUCAUSE WIT GC in Slack! #book_club (new channel). If you don't already use Slack, here is a Quick Start Guide.

Send in your stories to the SUNY WIT MythBusters series:

As a reminder, these are the myths we will be busting in 2025:

• Myth #1: Women are not interested in or passionate about technology
• Myth #2: Tech careers are only for individuals with strong mathematical or technical skills
• Myth #3: Tech is a male-dominated field and not welcoming to women
• Myth #4: Women cannot balance family and personal life with a career in tech

You can email your stories to me or submit them to this online Google form.
I know that there are a lot of myth-busting SUNY folks out there!

All the best,
Holly

For People Like Me

Hello all,

This week I'm posting a few groups of links to resources for our continued growth and education. If you're anything like me (and I know I am...laugh with me!) most of us didn't learn enough Black History, Native American History, Women's History, White American History, or even overall world history as we were getting our educations. There just wasn't enough time or emphasis. That's why lifelong learning is so important!

We can learn now from websites like the ones listed here for Black History Month, and by participating in conferences with our colleagues, and by sharing our stories.

Celebrating Black History Month:

• SUNY Official Statement 2025
• Smithsonian Institute
• Black History Month: 30 Outstanding Black Women in Tech
• Black Women Have Always Been at the Forefront of Tech

Gearing up for late spring/summer SUNY Conferences:

• CIT at Oneonta May 20-23
• STC Lake Placid June 2-5
• SUNYLA at Delhi June 18-20

Send in your stories to the SUNY WIT MythBusters series:

As a reminder, these are the myths we will be busting in 2025:

• Myth #1: Women are not interested in or passionate about technology
• Myth #2: Tech careers are only for individuals with strong mathematical or technical skills
• Myth #3: Tech is a male-dominated field and not welcoming to women
• Myth #4: Women cannot balance family and personal life with a career in tech

You can email your stories to me or submit them to this online Google form.

I know that there are a lot of myth-busting SUNY folks out there!

All the best,
Holly

Better Allies Snippet #1 (The Ally Journey)

This month we're starting with the first chapter of Karen Catlin's book Better Allies 2nd ed.

After an introduction covering Catlin’s work as V.P. of Engineering at Adobe, and their experiences with discrimination against talented women and minorities—often unintended—we begin with Chapter 1: The Ally Journey. Catlin writes:

“Allyship is a process. Even seasoned allies with wide open minds are constantly learning and absorbing new information about how to leverage their privilege to support people who are different from them… your first tip for being an ally is to be open to learning, improving, and changing your opinion. And recognize that being an ally is a journey.”

This opening sets the stage for us to approach these concepts with a growth mindset, and to use our skills and experiences as SUNY employees as part of that journey.

On page 12, the book delves into the issue of privilege:

“Understanding privilege is key to becoming a better ally. At its core, privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group.”

Further:

“People who are marginalized in multiple ways experience amplified marginalization and drastically reduced privilege. This is due to intersectionality, the fact that the combination of someone's identities creates an intersection of overlapping and compounded oppressions.”

Catlin defines intersectionality in the book, and other definitions are easily found online as well.

“Now here's where it gets tricky: Privilege is often invisible to those who have it. This means that many people get defensive when someone points out their privilege. And many people are quick to respond that they've had their fair share of difficulties and faced down prejudices too. But privilege is not about who you are as an individual as much as it is about what groups you belong to and how these groups are viewed and treated by society… Being privileged doesn't mean you've never worked hard and it doesn't necessarily mean your life has been easy.”

We are all advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. Striving to be a better ally requires us to be more self-aware of our particular privileges.

On page 17 Catlin reminds us that “privilege is often a key ingredient in cultivating professional confidence.” Examples include:

• Confidence that you're getting paid equitably.
• Confidence that when you make a point in a meeting others will pay attention.
• Confidence that people believe you've landed your current role because of experience and potential.

So, you can use your positions of privilege to help others. On pages 18-27, the book covers different types of roles that allies can play. The ally roles covered include the:

1. Sponsor: when you support the work of a specific colleague
2. Champion: when you speak up for others in public
3. Amplifier: where you ensure that the voices of others will be heard
4. Advocate: when you enable someone else to get an opportunity and use your power to bring others into exclusive circles
5. Scholar: where you learn as much as possible and then bring that information out to your network
6. Upstander: when you speak up for others acting as Catlin says in “the opposite of a bystander.” The upstander “pushes back on offensive comments or jokes even if no one within earshot might be offended or hurt.”
7. Confidant: when you listen to others and create a space for them “to express their fears, frustrations and needs.”

Catlin closes out chapter 1 by explaining that we are all imperfect people, we're all learning, and as allies we need to be OK with sometimes getting it wrong. Being afraid to speak up because we're not quite sure we're going to do it in the right way means we do nothing. An imperfect ally is still better than the silent bystander.

Rituals, Community, and the Rhythm of Life

Hello all,

Many of our modern rituals have ancient roots, including the seasonal ones. As someone who loves winter snow but not the bitter wind, when the days start getting longer again I also hope for an early spring. And when the seed catalogs start arriving in my mail—then I'll really be feeling it! But now we know—from the groundhog for 2025...six more weeks of winter.

Even our seemingly silly rituals like Groundhog Day often have deeper meanings. As detailed in this Groundhog Day: Ancient Origins of a Modern Celebration, this midpoint between the solstice and the equinox was an important holiday for some ancient Europeans. They brought this ritual to the Americas, and it evolved over time.

"The best known Groundhog Day ceremony occurs each year in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. This annual festival traces its origin to 1887, when members of the local Elks Lodge first went to nearby Gobbler’s Knob to consult a groundhog about the weather. The observance developed into an annual tongue-in-cheek ceremony at which the groundhog, given the name “Punxsutawney Phil” in the 1960s, communicates his prediction to the “Inner Circle,” a group of men wearing formal suits and top hats. Though it’s only one of many Groundhog Day ceremonies held all across the United States and /" target="_blank">Canada, the Punxsutawney event is certainly the most well-known, especially since it became the basis of the renowned philosophical comedy film Groundhog Day, which the Library of Congress inducted into the National Film Registry in 2015."

But this feeling of anticipating/yearning for a new season is not only historical/agricultural, it applies to the seasons of our lives and the seasons of our careers. It also calls us to the community. Because these midpoint season rituals aren't things we do alone. In higher education we have seasons too. Most of us just started a new spring semester, with all the semester cycles of library and technology and administrative work. Our higher education seasons don't align perfectly with our agricultural seasons or the seasons of our careers, and that can leave us feeling out of sync/off balance. And when the external world also seems off balance, people and things can start to fray.

The remedy for this - find your community and sustain the rituals and activities that mark time, that offer support and comfort, that celebrate achievements, that bring you peace.

All the best,
Holly