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My name is Brittany Edwards, I am a Kalamazoo College Alum and President of the Graduate and Professional Student Body at the University of Minnesota. My name is Alfonso Sintjago and I am the Executive Vice President. We appreciate your consideration for the Kalamazoo College Arcus Center Collaborative Leadership Prize.

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We represent the ten councils of the graduate and professional programs, from law to medicine. We are practicing a collaborative leadership model with the future leaders of these fields.

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We are supported by office of student affairs through student fees, and collaborate with the undergraduate student governance.

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Our decisions are based on a developmental evaluation model using tools such as focus groups and survey methods. This is a word cloud of the qualitative data from our student body.

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This year we have added support and training from the Center for Integrative Leadership at UMN, which is similar to Arcus.

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These are the tenets of integrative leadership. The main idea is that the best leaders believe in shared power, dialogue and imagination to solve our World's Grand Challenges.

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Our goals are to manage complex challenges within the University, and beyond, to encourage the ideal that everyone can be a leader with the right training. We work on collaborative projects with stakeholders within and beyond the University.

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We train students to lead using civic engagement techniques, such as World Cafe and Polarity Mapping, rather than the standard practices of Roberts Rules and debate, so everyone can be heard.

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Harvesting in conversation allows us to actively listen, it allows for everyone to participate in and heard, and to move from conversation to social change.

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Various organizations such as UNESCO and the US Government as increasingly promoting open policies and standard as a way in which to more effectively solve challenges. We at the University of Minnesota are applying different emerging technologies such as greater openness to reduce the costs of education and improve access to information.

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improvements in technology are allowing for the increase interaction between stakeholders, and decision makers. Information is increasingly available to anyone. Through Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Content, Open Educational Resources, and Open Standards and Policies we can improve government, organizations, and their ability to address challenges.

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By promoting open access, students will be able to access a greater library of resources, that will also be available to anyone with internet access. Even schools such as Harvard and Stanford have had to reduce journal subscriptions based on cost. We want the public schools of the US to require that public research stay public. This allows for greater innovation.

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Reducing textbook costs can greatly reduce student educational expenses. Textbooks costs have increased a rate much greater than the rate of inflation. It is the most expedient way to address higher education costs and improve a broken market.

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Instead of spending over a thousand dollars every year, students will be able to obtain comparable resources for a fraction of the cost or at no cost. These books can also be adapted to fit the needs of every course.

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California has been a leader in this process by authorizing the production of 50 open textbooks for the most common undergraduate courses. We are working with legislators to enact a similar policy in the state of Minnesota.

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Taking into consideration the goals of a land grant institution along with the affordances of emerging technologies we can more effectively meet the challenges of the 21st century.

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Massive Online Open Courses benefit anyone in the world and are available at no cost to students. We believe that MOOCs can also be developed to address Grand Challenges. We are hosting an Open Space Forum on E-learning with the Provost office to discuss some of these challenges.

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by promoting open innovation, open ideas, and open government all of which promote a greater level of collaboration challenges can be managed or addressed more effectively.

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Finding Common Ground Forums are opportunities to address Grand Challenges and practice the engagement tools with stakeholders involved across the region. This model is being reviewed by the World Health Organization and Food Agriculture Organization at the UN for application worldwide. Our goal is to teach the method to student leaders in our University programs.

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Past topics have included human trafficking, animal health and worker well-being and antibiotic use in agriculture. These discussions have brought local, state and federal agencies, large corporations, nonprofits and activist groups to literally the same table, in a novel way, to discuss polarizing issues across difference.

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We are planning a mental health and gun violence forum in April sponsored by the Center for Integrative Leadership and the graduate and professional student body.

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All our methods are grounded in program evaluation techniques taught in the College of Education and at the Humphrey School. Through triangulation and in-depth analysis we are able to better understand current challenges.

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This is a logic model outlining our activities, outputs and outcomes.

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Our goal is to challenge our students to practice a higher level of leadership that we see in our state and federal democracies today. It is not easy. People are often reticent to try new ideas, or change the status quo. We feel that the best part of student government is that we are students of government. We have tried to use our organization as an opportunity to try new methods and evaluate their effectiveness in a lab environment of the University. We hope you see that this is a way, as we do, to address the Grand Challenges our society faces now and in the future. We appreciate the Arcus Center selection committee for your consideration of our application.