Community Development Training in Higher Education: What We’ve Learned Building It
Unless you work in one of these offices, you may not have noticed that something quietly changed in the language colleges and universities use. Departments that were connected to the words diversity, inclusion, or belonging a few years ago now go by community development. There are deans of community now. That’s a good thing, and the change isn’t only cosmetic or strategic. If you zoom out, it reflects a shift in what institutions are trying to build, and it names a gap that existed even when social justice was at the front of every conversation: schools want a stronger community, and very few of them have a program that knows how to teach it well.
We’ve spent years cutting our teeth on exactly that, working with schools like Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, UVA, Duke, Manhattan School of Music, and a number of community colleges. We’re building better programs now than we ever have, and we think it’s worth sharing what’s working and what other community development leaders might take from it. That’s why we’re writing this
Why this is harder now than it used to be
The oldest members of Gen Z turn 30 this year. That means there are several layers of introspection happening on campus at once, and the generational gaps between them aren’t just about values. They’re about the language of learning and teaching itself. What counts as a mistake, how you’re allowed to recover from one, and who gets to decide.
A school should be a place where learning and teaching can happen safely. That means the cancel culture that exists in the world at large shouldn’t be reflected directly onto a campus. If anything, a university should be a buffer, a place with enough safety that people can engage in hard conversations, learn from them, and give each other grace.
Students arrive caught between two pulls. On one side, they’re trying to grow out of the high school and junior high mindset of cliques and exclusion, a mindset that formed while they were socializing so fast they never got the chance to reflect on it. On the other side, social media has trained them to make quick judgments in an attention-starved world.
So students, more than ever, need the chance to actually learn social behavior the way social behavior gets learned. Not by being told a value. By experiencing something, reflecting on it, processing other people’s perspectives on it, and then demonstrating what they learned by socializing it with the people around them. Those four steps are how community values become habits instead of slogans.
And yes, incoming classes are walking into a culture that already exists. But they’re also walking into a culture that’s shifting. The upperclassmen passing down the norms were themselves first-years a few years ago, and they came in through social justice and COVID in a way that was hard and disjointed. The habits they picked up don’t always translate, and they don’t automatically carry the best values forward. But when the voices of the upperclassmen who are truly community-centered get amplified, and it’s their values that get passed on, there’s an enormous amount of potential in that.
Why the default programs don't stick
We’ve heard the same things for years, and they’re valid. The content is abstract. It isn’t actionable. It’s ephemeral, one session and gone, so it never builds a habit.
And the people who most needed to be in the room weren’t there; the outspoken advocates showed up, and everyone else stayed home. (If you’re wondering what we mean by outspoken advocates, we wrote about it in our Two in the Room piece.)
We live in a digital world, and digital learning matters even for social values. But the question is how you do it in a way that doesn’t feel conceptual or vapid, and that fits inside the real constraints of a first-year student’s life. A first-year is a sponge. They’re absorbing everything from orientation to their first classes to their first round of exams. That window is when they are most open to being shaped by good community learning, and it’s short.
How we build it
Start with people they recognize. Every program we build begins by interviewing a curated cross-section of upperclassmen and graduate students at that school, across different identities and backgrounds, and recording what they have to say. Not in DEI language. In community language. What they wish they’d known walking in. How they handle the friction that inevitably comes up. What they do about the quick judgments people make of each other. And how they got past their own social mistakes, because everyone makes them.
That recognition is the entry point. When a first-year hears a fourth-year from their own building say the hard thing out loud, it lands differently than any expert could make it land.
Teach behaviors, not value statements. This matters a lot to us, and it’s a little counterintuitive for a company called Empathable. We think empathy is the result. We don’t think it’s the means. Think of empathy like a rainbow. The rainbow is what everyone wants to see, but the ingredients are light, air, and moisture in the right amounts. So we teach the ingredients: core skills that are actionable and grounded, that a student can practice on a Tuesday.
We call them the ABCDs, because it’s easy to remember: Acknowledging, Being Curious, and Demonstrating community values. Here’s how we put it to students in our current program:
“Acknowledging is how you let someone’s experience be as real as your own. Being curious is how you keep a person whole in your mind instead of deciding who they are and stopping there. And demonstrating is the part anyone can actually see. It is the only part that changes a room.”
Make it real. The heart of every program is what we call a walk: a short immersive experience where you see a real moment through someone else’s eyes. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re recreations of real moments from the lives of real students, faculty, and staff at that school, told to us by the people who lived them. A professor introducing an international student to a former student who made it through. A comment in a rehearsal that someone thought was harmless. A teacher lifting a student up in front of a room.
After each walk, students write, hear how other students at their school reacted, and talk it through with a partner. Then they carry it into a live session with the rest of their cohort. Experience, reflect, process other perspectives, demonstrate.
We also take the hard moments seriously, because students do. Here’s what we say after one of the harder walks:
“Cancel culture is what happens when we take away someone’s sense of belonging because they did something wrong. And actions should have consequences. Nobody is arguing with that. But a school is a place where everyone is actively learning, which means the room we give each other here can be more generous than what the internet hands out. And that is not only the administration’s job. That is available to you, on a random Tuesday, in a hallway.”
Build for faculty and staff too, from their own stories. The learning process is the same for everyone, because people learn social values in a very similar way at every age. But the content is not. When we build a faculty and staff program, the walks and the interviews come from faculty and staff experiences at that school. Their friction, their moments, their language. That’s the difference between a program that feels like it was made for someone else and one that feels like it was made for you, and we’ve seen it be incredibly effective at reaching the middle of the bell curve: the well-meaning majority who go quiet when a moment gets awkward, and who decide what a hallway feels like.
Build for the habit, not the session. Every program includes a time capsule. Students write down what they’re afraid of in week one, and what they’d promise to do differently. It comes back to them at the end, and they get to revise it with everything they’ve learned. Then we ask them to do one more thing: put a repeating reminder on their calendar, once a month, to ask how much they’re actually practicing this. As we tell them, “one event a month is enough to turn all of this into a habit instead of a nice memory.”
What the numbers say
At a leading college that we’ve worked with for a half a decade, where our program has been mandatory for all incoming students for several years, 95% of participants complete it. 92% have called it the most impactful digital learning experience they’ve ever had. On average, participants show a 42% increase in empathic skill scores and a 28% increase in their sense of belonging in the community. The program has since expanded to faculty and staff as a school-wide initiative, and the same model now runs at conservatories and universities across the country.
Where this leaves us
We tell students at the start of every program that some people think empathy is soft, but it isn’t. It’s like water, or air. When there isn’t enough, things go wrong.
When a group has it, everyone feels better.
A community isn’t a group of people who all like each other. It’s a group of people who know they’re part of something together and know they have a role in holding each other up. That can be taught. It has to be taught well, early, in the students’ own voices, and in a way that builds a habit rather than a memory. Everyone in the building is doing this life for the first time. The least we can do is give them a real way to learn it.
If you’d like to see what this looks like at your school.