Happy New Year!

2025 will undoubtedly be one for the history books for Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance and our partners! Just before Winter Break began, our team was deeply engaged in our quarterly meetings (lovingly referred to as Slow Down Week and, ironically, there’s nothing slow about it). I shared with them, and feel compelled to share with you, that everything in my heart tells me 2025 will see monumental shifts for our organization and community that will lay the foundation for the next decade of our work in Tulsa and across our state.

I want to make that case to you partly because it excites and energizes me but also because I’m hopeful that more members and partners of our Alliance will join us as we nurture the STEM ecosystem around us. As I’ve found myself fond of saying, “we get to decide.” If we want a better community for our kids, we decide that and do it. I hope you believe that and take it to heart this year.

So, in the spirit of the New Year, I’ll frame my expectations for Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance in 2025 as manifestations. We have the minds and wisdom on our team and across our Alliance to do these and many more wonderful things in 2025. May the very best and most impactful versions of these manifestations be realized with ease.

1. Cultivate Impactful Partnerships >>>

 Manifestation: In 2025, TRSA will create innovative mechanisms to cultivate impactful partnerships across our ecosystem aligned to the shared mission of inspiring and preparing all youth for a STEM-enabled future.

 Thanks to our team’s considerable brain power and care with this effort, we are evolving as an ecosystem and have a new model for creating mutually beneficial partnerships with explicit, shared commitments to the goals of our ecosystem: increase access to excellent STEM experiences in school, out of school, and in professional settings with mentor relationships.

 It’s already launched and is off to a great start! The continued evolution of our North Tulsa STEM Hub’s collaborative problem-solving and the continuous improvement efforts of those partners involved in MOMENTUM (now including free program evaluations and the option to become a certified issuer of digital badges for youth) are both fantastic versions of the work an Alliance can do when we move beyond being collaborative toward a more interconnected and transformative relationship.

 Out-of-school providers, STEM employers and funders, community organizations, government and tribal agencies, and all schools are encouraged to join! It’s free and serves to increase alignment, support, and amplify our partners’ outstanding work.

 We are looking for the first 25 organizations to go through the process with us to formalize your role as a Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance partner. For more information, please contact us at Info@TulsaSTEM.org. Use the subject line “Attn: Impactful Partnerships.”

2. Cultivate Impactful Learning Pathways >>>

 Manifestation: In 2025, TRSA will build upon the existing strengths of our current projects and the fantastic work of our partners to create robust learning pathways, articulated through Digital Badges, for youth that align with best practices in youth development and STEM learning. More students can participate in more and better STEM programming in and out of school. They are encouraged to try out new things and find it easy to continue down paths they are inspired to pursue, and our collective impact as a community is dramatically increased as we reach more of the youth in our community who would not otherwise be inspired and prepared to pursue STEM experiences.

 Again, our team’s brain work is remarkable on this one! Our direct services to youth and educators are already creating moments of learning and inspiration that would not have otherwise occurred. We also managed to collaborate with nearly 300 partners last year – a starting place that is truly remarkable on its own.

 As you might expect, work is underway on this goal! Our team is working on our initiatives in mentoring, competitions, professional development, and more. Over the year, the work we’ve put into digital badges alongside the Opportunity Project and with support from our friends at Left Bank Consulting will become ubiquitous across our community as we invite our partners to become certified issuers.

We are thrilled to be on the precipice of launching Digital Badges systemwide in 2025. For more information, visit this page and contact us at Info@TulsaSTEM.org. Use the subject line “Attn: Learning Pathways.”

3. Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance Becomes a Model Workplace >>>

 Manifestation: In 2025, TRSA will continue to evolve as an employer and workplace that empowers its staff, embodies its values, and embraces distributed decision-making principles that promote equivalence and efficiency.

 As a personal note, sharing this manifestation isn’t easy. In 3+ years at TRSA, we have continually found ways to improve at every turn, but more can be done. According to our internal staff satisfaction surveys, there are many opportunities to improve our communication, accountability, and strategy. These are all squarely in my court to address, and I hope the new year clarifies how our team operates and gets things done.

 In 2024, I spent a considerable amount of time reading and learning about models of workplace decision-making and delegative leadership models. The one that has found a home in my heart and mind is Sociocracy, which emphasizes decentralized decision-making, equivalence in participation, and a focus on continuous improvement. Sociocracy assumes that sharing power within an organization requires a plan. Ted Rau and Jerry Koch-Gonzalez describe this in the Sociocracy guide, “Many Voices, One Song” (p.1, 2018), saying, “Power is like water: it will go somewhere, and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate more power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation.”

We are thrilled to be in the learning and planning phase of our Sociocracy implementation. For more information about the Sociocracy, visit this site.