About NOLS Self-Assembly
Our Group
We are a group of NOLS alumni, current and former NOLS faculty and staff, former NOLS Advisory Council Members and Trustees. Our objective is to serve as a link between NOLS and the greater NOLS community for an open discussion about how NOLS is staying true to its mission and the practice of expedition behavior.
Our Current objective
Our current objective is to call on NOLS leadership not to overlook the obvious: the urgent need to create the context for real and lasting change – a functioning NOLS culture.
NOLS leadership needs to include in its action plan how to address a dysfunctional NOLS culture, which a poorly implemented DEI initiative helped bring about.
We are concerned that NOLS' three layered initiative - raising funds, working on its strategic plan and bringing a new NOLS president up to speed - will fail.
Our Goal
Our goal is to keep NOLS focused on its core principles as it navigates the related interpersonal and intrapersonal issues that the school and the larger society face today. We created our website to share our findings with the greater NOLS community - past, present, and future.
Our Start
Our group's start in 2022 was inspired by one of the NOLS' four key leadership roles and how this group came together. NOLS defines "self-leadership as much a personal role as it is a team role. Each team member is responsible for demonstrating self-leadership: personal initiative and character and attention to one's well-being in order to be a productive member of the group and the larger society".
For the past several years, many of us took a self-leadership role to reach out to the school to voice our concerns individually that NOLS, through the poor implementation of its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiative, is no longer true to its mission.
Most often, the response was no response.
Through informal contacts over the summer of 2022, we recognized that we could be more effective if we self-assembled. Defined by Wikipedia as "a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction."
Self-leadership within an organized structure – NOLS Self-Assembly.
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