What role does creativity play in our collective thriving? What sorts of art does a thriving community make, engage, reject, read, play, and share? This session will explore art and cultural practice in community spaces, rooted in the Multicultural Community Center’s staff’s experience of fostering a co-curricular center as both practitioners of higher education and artists. We’ll discuss cultural practice as a pedagogical tool and art as curriculum, and culture as a flashpoint for generative friction, embodied experience, and embeddedness within both tradition and innovation.

Thriving and servingness are centered on transformation. Institutional transformation is a journey. It will not happen overnight, and there will be pivots and shifts necessary to continue the work. As we embark on this collective journey, contributing specific lenses and offering different approaches to serving the many communities on campus to establish Thriving, mapping the landscapes can be a useful tool in creating a plan for a unit or even an individual in contributing to campus Thriving and servingness.Maps can have many elements and take on many forms: stories, visuals, relationships, roles, language, spaces and more. The process of mapping landscapes and ecosystems can help us better understand where we are, where we want to be and ultimately, how we get there. This session will lead participants through both a theoretical and physical mapping of opportunities and challenges for Thriving and servingness landscapes in relation to specific department or unit contexts (or individual desires to engage with these efforts).

Thriving is a strategy for change and intervention. It is a strategy developed and located within a top-ranked, rigorous, highly bureaucratic, complex public research university. Within such an environment, it can be challenging to identify with clarity what’s “not” working and, simultaneously, impossible not to feel it. It can take time, something we often don’t have or don’t take, to unwind the “who-what-when-where-why” of something (policy, practice, system, etc.), much less get to the “how” of it. Thriving as a generative intervention asks us to be reflective, curious, critical, to interrupt, and to build. In this session, we’ll gather to discuss the possibilities and practices of purposeful interruption and troubling.

Too often, we focus on the reasons something cannot be achieved—because it has never been done before or because we struggle to imagine what success might look like. When we think about thriving for marginalized communities at universities, it can be difficult to envision what true thriving looks like or how we might get there. But what if we dared to imagine thriving instead of merely surviving? What if students, staff, and faculty were thriving in every corner of campus? What would that look like? How might it reshape the culture of the university? Rather than focusing on whether students arrive with the skills, resources, and preparation needed to thrive, what if we focused on creating the conditions that make thriving possible? What if we built villages of support that foster belonging, connection, and collective success? A Village approach recognizes that the responsibility for creating a thriving campus environment does not belong to a single office or department. Instead, it harnesses the collective power of the entire campus community, aligning efforts across units and stakeholders to support students holistically and build the capacity for them to flourish.

In this session, participants will learn how one community developed a Village model that created the conditions and capacity for its members to thrive. Participants will also explore promising practices and strategies for building thriving ecosystems that cultivate success, well-being, and belonging across campus.

What if everything we envision about thriving– for our students, our departments, our campus, ourselves, and our communities– depends on us telling our stories? What is the story of thriving at Cal, and who's at the helm of it (and who’s not)? When we do the work of narrative change: are we prepared to be changed too? Through poetic testimony and interactive strategy-sharing, this session is a sound check on the role of storytelling and narrative power within our collective work, led by a seasoned poet and cultural practitioner who joined the EJCE staff a month ago today, yet has worked with UC Berkeley, the UC/CSU and CA’s community college campuses through artistic/professional development and performance collaborations for the last 20 years.  In that spirit: this session invites us to forego theorizing about thriving (for a moment) in order to flex our creative muscles enough to place us firmly at the heart of its promise. Beyond what it looks like: what does thriving taste like? Sound like? What is thriving to our students in the age of climate catastrophe and a growing mistrust of those in power? Who among us are the storytellers? What if it’s all of us? This session is a collective practice run on taking inventory of what stories we have, what stories we need, and who among us will be its keepers, with tailorable resources on how to do so moving forward. 

What if everything we envision about thriving– for our students, our departments, our campus, ourselves, and our communities– depends on us telling our stories? What is the story of thriving at Cal, and who's at the helm of it (and who’s not)? When we do the work of narrative change: are we prepared to be changed too? Through poetic testimony and interactive strategy-sharing, this session is a sound check on the role of storytelling and narrative power within our collective work, led by a seasoned poet and cultural practitioner who joined the EJCE staff a month ago today, yet has worked with UC Berkeley, the UC/CSU and CA’s community college campuses through artistic/professional development and performance collaborations for the last 20 years.  In that spirit: this session invites us to forego theorizing about thriving (for a moment) in order to flex our creative muscles enough to place us firmly at the heart of its promise. Beyond what it looks like: what does thriving taste like? Sound like? What is thriving to our students in the age of climate catastrophe and a growing mistrust of those in power? Who among us are the storytellers? What if it’s all of us? This session is a collective practice run on taking inventory of what stories we have, what stories we need, and who among us will be its keepers, with tailorable resources on how to do so moving forward. 

The political now calls for contextual courage, or the principled willingness to take informed, values-aligned risks within one’s institutional role. This interactive session helps participants discover their “contextual courage” through reflection, dialogue, and action planning. Using the research-informed Contextual Courage Tool, participants will identify and reflect on their Courage Profile, explore strategies for navigating challenges within their identified guardrails, or areas where risks, habits, or conditions might limit courageous action, and develop collective action plans to meet the current moment with purpose and alignment.

The Belonging Resident Company, a dance/theater troupe directed by Sarah Crowell and Sangita Kumar, presents a workshop experience that centers collaboration, creativity, embodied storytelling, and joy, as we co-create strategies for collective liberation. This workshop will combine simple movement and theater exercises that work to remove obstacles to experiencing joy and connection. We will also participate in dialogue that connects with the movement and mindfulness practices.

A sound bath is a deeply relaxing, immersive and meditative whole-body listening experience where participants are “bathed” in sound with love and care. You'll experience the soothing sound vibrations of an ocean wave drum, crystal singing bowls, and Koshi chimes. Reiki is an energy healing modality originating from Japan. It fosters mindfulness, relaxation, stress relief, and clarity by balancing the energy flow through our bodies. When combining Reiki healing with a sound bath, people can leave a healing session feeling more energized, light, and invigorated. Intended to help us build our internal resources during these uncertain times. No experience needed. You are welcome as you are.

In this session, participants will join facilitators from Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning for a conversation about the relationship between teaching, thriving, and the students we serve. Recognizing the many roles equity-oriented staff play at Berkeley, we take an expansive view of what "teaching practice" can mean — inviting attendees to create and reflect on images of their interactions with students, and to explore how that kind of storytelling can open new possibilities for thriving alongside them.

Catching the attention of potential funders and advocates can be a challenge. They are flooded with inquiries and asks from every direction. How can you make yourself stand out from the crowd? This interactive session will help you develop an intriguing and persuasive message platform to help you achieve your personal and/or professional objectives.