The power of collaboration: the ATD Strategy Hub as a source of peer learning

Community colleges serve as engines of social mobility, catering to a wide spectrum of students — from recent high school graduates to working adults seeking new skills or career changes. While each college may be unique in its offerings and student demographics, within this diversity lies a treasure trove of knowledge, best practices, and innovative strategies. Yet, too often, this knowledge is challenging to access when it’s needed, or it’s buried within long reports or research papers, making it hard for busy college leaders to find. 

Why begin with strategies for serving adult learners? 

After 20 years of work across the country with institutions serving a diverse range of communities, we have cultivated a large wealth of knowledge about strategies that increase access, success, equity, and economic mobility. As we considered where to begin in curating strategies for the Hub, we wanted to focus on a topic that would address the urgent questions we are working with colleges to address today: enrolling and supporting adult learners.  

As the K–12 population across many communities begins to decline, more attention has been paid to how we can better serve adult learners juggling multiple responsibilities in addition to their identities as learners. As a field, there is already a lot we know about the challenges adult learners face in accessing and completing higher education, even as we continue to uncover new challenges and strategies that can make college more feasible for them. The Strategy Hub launched with a focus on this population because of the urgency and magnitude of the changes to college processes, policies, and culture needed to effectively serve this population at scale. By pooling our joint insights on enrolling and supporting adult learners from our work in the field, including ongoing innovative grant projects, we aim to enable more colleges to access this knowledge swiftly for accelerated implementation. 

What’s next for the Strategy Hub? 

Looking ahead, the Strategy Hub will evolve, incorporating additional strategies for serving adult learners and expanding into other domains of ATD’s expertise, encompassing equity, comprehensive student supports, and teaching methodologies. We will work closely with our expert staff, coaches, and colleges to curate fresh strategies, provide more practical tools, and share more stories of success from across the Network.  

The process through which community colleges learn from each other isn’t just about problem-solving; it’s about continuous improvement. When colleges engage in a dialogue focused on improvement, they foster a culture of learning and adaptability. They challenge each other to aspire for excellence, driving innovation and progress in the education sector. We hope the Strategy Hub becomes one more way we can facilitate this progress together, as a Network and as a field.