The Bay Area sounds like a great place to do this type of work. Can you share a little bit about how the different partnering organizations were selected? Additionally, is there training providing to the different organizations, and what type of support system is put in place to maintain communication between the different organizations.

Thanks for your comments and questions. The project is led by UC San Francisco and the Alameda County Office of Education and thus our focus is on those two counties - SF and Alameda. We are focusing on supporting high school science learners from underrepresented backgrounds to successfully transition to postsecondary environments.

In regards to partner organizations, we are working with Paul Born of the Tamarack Institute and are using his Top 100 exercise (http://tamarackcci.ca/files/the_top_100_partner...) to develop a list of top 100 people and organizations in our community that could help us realize the change we want to see. From this Top 100 list we are then identifying the Top 20 prospects, encompassing individuals that will give use some quick partnerships, including those we know well and are sure to join if asked as well as those with significant influence. Paul Born is providing technical assistance and capacity building to partners related to collective impact and community engagement.

Currently our communication infrastructure includes in-person meetings, conference calls, and email communication. We use Asana for staff team and working group collaboration. We will also soon be launching a monthly newsletter. We are in the process of designing additional tools for online engagement and have looked at a crowdsourcing tool called IdeaWave: http://blink.ucsd.edu/sponsor/scspoc/ideawave/index.html.

Wow, seems very fun and thoughtful. I'm curious about the collective impact model and what that looks like--how to you organize yourselves to move progress forward across multiple organizations?

Thanks Michael. RECESS seeks to bring together a wide spectrum of stakeholders with one common goal: increasing the participation of populations that have been historically underrepresented in STEM careers. To do so, we are relying on the CI Model with its three stages (initiating action, organizing for impact, and sustaining action) while also integrating promising practices from other collaborative models:

1. Maintaining trust through equal positioning of all RECESS members, particularly community members.
2. Providing formal and informal means for continuous communication to build trust among group members.
3. Employing participatory practices to address power imbalances among members and ensure diverse representation and engagement.

I directed a study a number of years ago that found, at the postsecondary level, that the biological and agricultural sciences are the only STEM disciplines in which women have reached parity with men and that the gender gap persists in engineering and computer science despite efforts to attract and retain female students in these fields. Which STEM fields seem to be the least attractive to your female students and for which are you beginning to realize success?

Thanks for the question Lauren. Our NSF INCLUDES RECESS project is just a few months in and we do not have data from our work on the attractiveness of different STEM fields for women. That said, and as you note, there is a strong literature base documenting the gender gap in engineering and computer science.