Geoscience programs are facing existential threats at a time when a wide array of geoscience tools are increasingly critical to community resilience. The Alliance-Building Offshore to Achieve Resilience and Diversity (All-ABOARD) project sought to pilot a professional development model to create a cohort of geoscience leaders around community building and a sense of belonging at a set of four institutions. The project team hypothesized that investing focused effort on intergenerational teams in the unique context of a ship/shore workshop with sustained support would lead to a crucible in which potential community leaders were recruited and retained, their leadership qualities nurtured, empowered and made resilient, institutional barriers were identified and addressed, and collective impact was maximized.

A nationwide application to be a part of the project resulted in all four teams being from the southeastern part of the country, including University of South Florida, West Virginia University, Salisbury University and Coastal Carolina University. Each project team consisted of 4 members, distributed among different career levels within the institution (e.g., a graduate student, a post-doc, a tenured faculty member and a department chair or dean).

Due to the tail-end of covid, a ship-based workshop was impossible, so instead the project pivoted to a 4-day retreat in the hills of central Tennessee. The retreat covered many topics in leadership development, team-building and background in institutional change. Leading up to the retreat, the project hosted a series of nine webinars around community building, science identity, vision and values, and “Be the Messenger,” a theoretical framework and tools to think about leadership. After the retreat, teams implemented geoscience community projects in each of their institutions, met online as a group to share successes and challenges, and a subset of project participants visited two of the campuses to tour their programs, meet university personnel and offer support, feedback and ideas.

Project data revealed that although the retreat did not take place on a ship as originally planned, it was a powerful experience for most participants and gave them tools and a support network to move forward in their departmental projects around belonging and community in the geosciences. The convening of intergenerational teams, in contrast to homogenized teams having members at or near the same career stage, was the most successful aspect of our program. As hoped, the project led to increased resilience and confidence in leadership skills. We found that the retreat and our intergenerational teams led to the cultivation of a strong identity as champion for change, enhanced group cohesion, and promoted feelings of resilience among participants. Our participants reported they felt most accountable to themselves and their teams, and that learning was accelerated by bringing together teams from multiple institutions to collaborate across intergenerational boundaries. Participants reported that one of the most impactful activities included the opportunity to work with their team and then to get feedback on their ideas from the other institutional teams. All-ABOARD provided a model for training community champions in geoscience who can advance strategic objectives in their home environments and demonstrates how frameworks from the social sciences can be effectively leveraged to strengthen geoscience at a time when many programs are facing contraction.

Last Modified: 05/29/2025
Modified by: Sharon K Cooper