The Cross College Alliance: A Q&A Update

By Ryan G. Van Cleave

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The Cross College Alliance was created in 2017 by the presidents of five institutions—Ringling College of Art and Design, State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota, New College of Florida, The Ringling/FSU, and University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. The objective of the Alliance is to leverage the expertise and assets of the collective CCA institutions to enhance and differentiate the learning opportunities available to all students, the competitiveness of our region’s workforce and employers, the vibrancy of our economy, and the quality of life of our community. This happens through collaboration and smart, focused efforts.

To find out a bit more about the CCA—including how things are going and what kind of effect COVID-19 has on it—let’s get the story directly from Linda de Mello, Manager of the CCA.

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People like numbers. What kind of numbers can you provide to help us get a handle on the CCA?

Collectively the 5 institutions:

• enroll over 19,000 diverse students each year
• offer 170 programs/certificates
• graduate 3,300 students with associate, baccalaureate and graduate degrees annually
• employ 440 full-time faculty, 2,200 staff and hundreds of part-time/adjunct faculty
• engage in multiple strategic partnerships and collaborations with businesses, nonprofit and educational organizations; provide faculty consulting and research expertise, student interns and volunteers, and offer thousands of programs to advance our region’s economy and quality of life 

The Cross College Alliance was created in 2017 by the presidents of five institutions—Ringling College of Art and Design, State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota, New College of Florida, The Ringling/FSU, and University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee. The objective of the Alliance is to leverage the expertise and assets of the collective CCA institutions to enhance and differentiate the learning opportunities available to all students, the competitiveness of our region’s workforce and employers, the vibrancy of our economy, and the quality of life of our community. This happens through collaboration and smart, focused efforts.

To find out a bit more about the CCA—including how things are going and what kind of effect COVID-19 has on it—let’s get the story directly from Linda de Mello, Manager of the CCA.

People like numbers. What kind of numbers can you provide to help us get a handle on the CCA?

Collectively the 5 institutions:

• enroll over 19,000 diverse students each year

• offer 170 programs/certificates

• graduate 3,300 students with associate, baccalaureate and graduate degrees annually

• employ 440 full-time faculty, 2,200 staff and hundreds of part-time/adjunct faculty

• engage in multiple strategic partnerships and collaborations with businesses, nonprofit and educational organizations; provide faculty consulting and research expertise, student interns and volunteers, and offer thousands of programs to advance our region’s economy and quality of life 

That’s impressive—I don’t think many people realize the cumulative size and impact of CCA institutions. Where does the funding for the CCA actually come from?

It comes from the generosity of the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Gulf Coast Community Foundation, The Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation, and the Manatee Community Foundation. In addition, each of the five CCA member institutions also makes an annual contribution to support the operational costs.

In a practical, day-to-day sense, what does the CCA do?

Our ultimate way of working is to create a collaborative culture/state of mind/awareness/behavior that encourages faculty, staff, and students to seek opportunities to collaborate, to share information and resources that enhance and differentiate the learning experiences and the management of resources provided by our CCA institutions for our students and our community. Simply to be more and do more by working smartly together.

And your role is to help encourage and support that?

It’s actually much bigger and more strategic than that. My role is a complex combination of organizing, being catalytic, being at the hub of diverse efforts, supporting, originating, and building diverse groups that accomplish a lot in a short period of time. A key service that I provide as Manager of the Alliance is to assist community members, businesses, and organizations in more easily identifying and accessing the appropriate person/office among the institutions. I also serve as a representative of the Alliance through my involvement in the region’s economic and educational organizations and initiatives. 

What’s a typical day like for you?

As I have done most of my professional life…my day begins early as I drink my first cup of coffee and respond to emails. I frequently have scheduled meetings with CCA teams and community leaders and organizations, and then I return to my office to work on projects and action items toward the end of the day. As people leave the building, I can concentrate on getting to finish unanswered emails and completing writing projects before finally stopping for the day. To my husband’s chagrin—given that he is our dinner cook—I’m notorious for “getting one more thing done” before leaving the office.

I’m responsible/accountable to all five CCA presidents. Since the CCA presidents didn’t choose to establish the CCA as a 501c3/nonprofit organization—Ringling College serves as CCA’s fiscal sponsor on behalf of all the CCA institutions (bless the Ringling College business office/HR/advancement staff and all CCA executive assistants). 

I now know all the “bunny trails” to travel to each of the CCA institutions in record time. I also have the advantage of having Josephine Eisenberg as my part-time assistant who is a great partner, administrator, and project manager.

In all your experience with the CCA—you’ve been there since April 2018—what has surprised you the most?

With all the demands on faculty and staff, and the limited resources they frequently have, that their commitment to providing an exceptional education for students and helping students succeed is paramount. The recent transition by faculty members at all CCA institutions to online courses exemplifies this. The learning curve they all faced was phenomenal—yet everyone pulled together with the assistance of fabulous staff to make courses available to students online in DAYS! 

I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to collaborate with these educators and to assist them.

What’s one exciting CCA project that’s in the works?

In 2019, an anonymous donor generously contributed funding to establish a paid summer internship program through the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. The Environmental Discovery Awards Internship Program (EDAP) is designed to provide highly accomplished CCA students who have significant financial need with high quality environmental science focused paid internships in partnership with our region’s stellar environmental organizations and research faculty. 

Internships are so vital for student success.

Agreed! And this summer, with the assistance of faculty and career services staff from our CCA institutions, we have doubled the number of organizations providing internships and tripled the number of student interns. We are in the process of investigating technological resources to provide the internships remotely in case COVID-19 directives make in-person internships impossible.

The vision of the program’s donor and the cooperation of our environmental organizations, internship supervisors, and researchers in doing all they can to provide these internships for our students given the challenges is inspiring. Next summer we hope to replicate the processes we use for the Environmental Discovery summer internship program to encourage other industry-focused internship programs as well. Having a well-orchestrated, multi-industry, paid internship program to strategically engage CCA students in making meaningful contributions to our economy and our community is critical to our region’s competitiveness in developing and retaining these talented students for our regional workforce.  

Wow, that’s pretty amazing. But that’s looking forward. Let’s look backward. What’s one of the more successful projects that the CCA has already done?

There are so many to choose from, but let’s go with the 2019 CCA Social Entrepreneurship Conference. 

Two students from New College—Daniel Schell and Emiliano Espinosa—wanted to create a student-led Social Entrepreneurship Conference to bring together successful entrepreneurs who have made an impact in their communities with students who want to solve today’s challenges through social entrepreneurship. Their challenge was that they had never designed or produced a conference, and neither of them was a social entrepreneur. Emiliano said that people told him to contact CCA (me) for help.  

In early January 2019, we developed a project plan, and CCA partnered with the students to engage key constituencies with the expertise, networks, and funding needed to produce the conference. Career development professionals as well as faculty, staff, and students from all of the CCA institutions assisted Daniel and Emiliano in designing, marketing, and staffing the conference. 

The learning experience of developing a seed of an idea for a conference to an exceptionally well-designed and executed day-long multifaceted program was a transformative learning experience for Emiliano and Daniel. Students from CCA institutions and local high schools had the opportunity to work-one-on-one with business mentors to develop their business ideas. And our region’s entrepreneurs took great pride in sharing their experiences and knowledge with student participants and contributing to their future success. 

The feeling conveyed by the participating entrepreneurs was that these students are OUR community’s students. And everyone said, “let’s do this again!”

I remember that conference. I shared information about it with all of my students and numerous private-sector colleagues. But that’s part of the issue here. I work at Ringling College and walk past your office there maybe three times a week, so I know what’s going on. People who don’t see you on a regular basis don’t always know what’s going on, or they have misinformed ideas.

What’s the most common misconception about the CCA?

That the Alliance enables any student to enroll in courses at any of the CCA institutions without any money changing hands among the institutions. That’s the goal but it has been disappointing to fully realize it for all the students. Financial aid stipulations, academic policies and scheduling challenges are some of the obstacles. In addition, students who request to enroll in a course offered by another CCA institution do so on a space-available basis. Because of the increased enrollments at many of our CCA institutions, cross-college courses which are requested by CCA students are sometimes filled to capacity by the institution’s own students as the semester begins.  

We’re currently exploring other opportunities to provide students with increased access to high-demand courses by obtaining funding to offer additional CCA-designated sections of high-demand credit courses and specially designed weekend workshops at no cost for CCA students.

That would be terrific since I know students at the other schools want courses from the creative writing major that I run, but we’re always at capacity due to the popularity of the classes and our faculty.

Let’s wrap this up in a super-efficient manner. In three points or less, tell us why the CCA matters.

Can do!

1. Success in the 21st century can’t be achieved without highly effective partnerships and collaborations. CCA demonstrates how it can be done and done well.

2. The expertise and resources to facilitate the lifelong learning required to be continually relevant in a time of dynamic, continuous disruption requires all of us—including our CCA institutions and their leaders and faculty—to creatively embrace and leverage the power of partnerships. Again, CCA is a great model for this. 

3. The capacity demonstrated by our CCA institutions in the midst of a crisis to transition in a matter of days to an almost total online environment is evidence that we can indeed think and act differently and thrive by leveraging our Alliance in the new normal.

For more information on the Cross College Alliance, please visit www.crosscollegealliance.org or contact Linda de Mello at ldemello@ringling.org.