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Taking Care of Ourselves & Each Other

Health & Well-Being

 Alumnae Brenda Mutuma, '13, left, Mireille Vargas. and Makshya Tolbert, '15, make an egg pasta from scratch in the Liberation Through Land: Organic Gardening and Racial Justice class. Credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service

Special Interest: Co-op (UTH-SI: Co-op) Criteria

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This criteria is the backbone for all Co-ops and also informs our application questions.

Decorative accent featuring eight dots representing the eight Neighborhood colors.

Criteria

  • ResX Core Principles - Every UTH-SI: Co-op should align with the four ResX Core Principles; namely, i) Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion; ii) Health & Well-being; iii) Community & Belonging; and iv) Intellectual & Personal Growth. Throughout the application, each prospective UTH-SI: Co-op must demonstrate that it will be mindful of these principles.
  • Leadership Team
    • Department: ResEd
    • Team: Student Staff, Students, Associate Deans, Neighborhood Program Directors, Graduate Resident Associates, Community Coordinators, Alumni. Faculty and other staff might also be included.
  • Theme Interest and Demand  - To have the greatest chance of success, the applicants must show evidence of student interest in the proposed theme (e.g., through a student survey results or a call for interest or previous years’ numbers of pre-assignees and committed residents) and demonstrate how the theme might meet the needs/desires/interests of undergraduates on campus. The theme must show sufficient interest to fill a residence in its entirety.
  • Integrated Learning & Community Values  - As ResX advocated, UTHs must be ‘relevant and in line with the University’s goals for undergraduate education and the theme implementation should be robust’. A coop should be focused, then, on nurturing the social and cultural environment of the house to actively engage, where possible, with the university’s learning priorities. This will be shown through plans that demonstrate the following:
    • Different ways for residents to show and model a shared commitment to the community. A focus on credible and stimulating opportunities for all kinds of engagement centered on the theme/dorm lifestyle that encourage reflection and positive action on the part of all residents; cooking and cleaning together; field trips, or a sequence of informal workshops, or other kinds of get-togethers run in the house by the coop each quarter and in which all participate. 
    • Cumulative learning experiences that show how the house’s lifestyle enhances the spirit of the collective, the personal development of individuals, the realization of the coop’s values and goals, and the flourishing of the community throughout the year. 
    • Coops will need to articulate how they hope to contribute to the well-being of their neighborhood by making meaningful connections and demonstrating good citizenship, as well as promoting the principles of their community in their neighborhood.
  • Institutional Commitment and Clear Resource Stream - To be successful, leadership teams must have a very brief general operations and logistics plan that shows some understanding of the resources required to run the theme and the annual deployment of those resources.
  • Measures of Success - To ensure that themes are designed and implemented to be a positive experience for all participants (as anticipated by the ResX principles), leadership teams must indicate how they will try to demonstrate success annually for review and audit. CoRL’s future reviews will lead by determining how well the declared objectives correlate with evidence-based outcomes.
The tulip magnolia trees behind Building 530 in full bloom. Credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service