Generate Summer Update

What We’ve Been Doing and Where We’re Going

From Nick Kaffine, Executive Director of Generate 2020–2021

“Generate is an inclusive, empowered, and audacious community that provides interdisciplinary education for the entrepreneurial spirit.”

This is our vision for Generate this year. The Management Team, which consists of; myself, the Executive Director; Emily McMichael, the Outreach Director; Eamon McCarthy, the Operations Director; Cullen Lampasso, the Hardware Director; and Elena Silva, the Software Director, has been hard at work since May to turn that vision into reality.

Now that we are only a few weeks away from the start of what promises to be a very unique Fall semester, we want to share what we have been doing with you. However, to go into detail about the many things the Management Team has been up to these past few months would probably not make an interesting read. Instead, I am excited to share what I feel are the three most important updates about our organization.

Formalizing Generate’s Core Values

We are Curious

We are a community that emphasizes learning and growth. We prioritize providing members with the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary projects and tasks that will contribute to their self-development.

We are Collaborative

We bring together students with diverse perspectives and levels of experience to work towards accomplishing a common goal and become a part of a community. We encourage members to share their knowledge and to both seek out, provide, and accept help from others.

We are Bold

We actively pursue challenges that push members to develop. We embrace failure and uncertainty as part of our process and actively work to learn from our mistakes.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

On June 2nd Generate put out a statement announcing our support of the Black Lives Matter movement and committing ourselves to fostering an inclusive community that is open to all. Since then the Management Team and members of our community have been working to turn our words into concrete action.

Here are the actions we have taken so far:

1. We endorsed the #BlackatNU platform. We did so to support Black student leaders on campus in their demand for actionable changes to be made by the University to tackle systemic racism in its institutions.
2. We began efforts to widen our applicant pool by reaching out to on-campus resources and student organizations that serve students from diverse backgrounds and asking that they share our applications with their networks.
3. We met with the Center for Intercultural Engagement (CIE) and had a productive conversation on what actions we should be taking to become a more diverse and inclusive organization. In the wake of that meeting, we have signed up for their email list to stay up to date on the various events and training they offer throughout the year that we can attend to not only educate ourselves but to connect with diverse students and organizations. We also forwarded a sample of our applications and interview questions to the CIE to get feedback on how inclusive they were. We received valuable feedback from the office and immediately made changes such as including a question in our application asking students for their personal pronouns.
4. We are coordinating with the Title IX office, Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, and CIE to schedule various cultural competency and anti-bias training for the Management Team and all other hiring managers to better prepare us to interview our applicants and run our organization more inclusively.
5. One of our faculty advisors, Ted Johnson, created a public channel in our Slack network to provide the Generate and Sherman Center communities with a place to share resources and have honest and open conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement and systemic racism.

photo by Avital Brodski

Here are the actions we are planning on taking moving forward:

1. All hiring managers that will be interviewing applicants for the Spring 2021 team will take relevant training offered by the Title IX office, Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, Center for Intercultural Engagement, and any additional on-campus organizations.
2. We will provide educational resources and encourage general members to participate in relevant training offered by the Title IX office, Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, Center for Intercultural Engagement, and any additional on-campus organizations.
3. We will develop a system for members of our community to utilize if they would like to provide feedback on what the Management Team is doing around these topics and if they would like to report a problem.
4. We will continue to work to widen our applicant pool even further for our Spring 2021 hiring cycle. We will reach out to organizations earlier on in our hiring cycle and will continue to build and maintain our relationships with organizations that can help us connect with and introduce Generate to students from diverse backgrounds.
5. We will share events and workshops put on by various on-campus organizations with our community to provide opportunities for continuous learning and engagement on topics related to diversity and inclusion throughout the year.
6. We will host a forum for our community to come together once a semester to have an open and honest discussion about what we are doing right and what we still need to do to keep improving.
7. We will create a semesterly report detailing our successes and failures on our journey to becoming a more diverse and inclusive organization to both keep a record for future Management Teams and to hold ourselves accountable.

As our Fall 2020 team comes together, these lists of completed and planned actions will continue to grow. I am excited to continue to share our progress with you.

Our Plans To Keep Our Community Safe, Engaged, and Connected

Safety is our number one priority. While we recognize that students will be welcomed back to campus for the Fall semester, we also recognize that as an organization with an average of 70 members a semester, Generate cannot operate business as usual.

With this in mind, we will not be requiring any of our members to come to campus this Fall. No exceptions.

Instead, we are following the lead of the Sherman Center and making a commitment to being online awesome. Rather than facing the task of operating our organization remotely as an annoyance to be dealt with, we are leaning into going online. We are going to do our best to take advantage of this unique opportunity to engage with our community in a different way, create good content, and learn how to work effectively together in this new reality. I am already so impressed at how Generate and the Sherman Center have continued to flourish in such difficult circumstances. We have a thriving community on Slack and have hosted trivia nights, fireside chats, board game nights and other events over Zoom. I look forward to seeing how our community continues to adapt and find new ways to stay connected while we have to be apart.

Though we are 100% committed to being online awesome, we also must address the elephant in the room: how our Build Studio will function.

Generally, the Sherman Center, including the makerspace, will not be accessible to anyone. However, we do understand that our members will be working on physical hardware projects for our clients this Fall and may need space and tools to complete that work. With that in mind, the Build Studio Support team is in the process of developing a system to ensure the makerspace is as safe to use as possible. We are staying on top of the guidance Northeastern is providing to determine how to set up this system in the most efficient and safe way possible.

I am proud of the work that we have done so far and how we have adapted to these unique circumstances. I look forward to all that we will accomplish this upcoming year.