Message from the Chair

WICHE Alliance Colleagues,

I am honored to serve as the Chair of our Western Alliance of Community College Academic Leaders, and I look forward to a terrific year and a half in support of our mission. This year, our theme is GROWTH. In order to ensure that our Alliance continues to deliver value and meaning to our members, who span the 15 states of our WICHE commission, we must all enhance our efforts to attract meeting attendees and enlist the support of meeting sponsors. Their involvement is essential.

As we look forward to our next annual meeting in Nevada in Spring 2025, growth is vital to ensuring that we are equipping as many academic leaders as we can with the information, strategies, and tools necessary for their personal and institutional success. At our October 2023 annual meeting in Tacoma, our panelists and speakers delivered outstanding presentations that offered our attendees real, tangible strategies for improving their own institutions. The topics included how to support justice-impacted students, what to know about reducing academic holds, how member states are expanding OER adoption, and ways to enhance and improve access to “Credit for What You’ve Already Learned.” These were excellent panels and we look forward to reprising our call for proposals ahead of Spring 2025 to gather equally impactful ideas and themes.

I encourage our members to share with their peers news of WICHE and its value to higher ed leaders from both academic and student-services roles. Our participation and attendance are critical to this organization’s survival and utility. Together, we can equip one another with the tools needed to tackle barriers to college enrollment, persistence, retention, and completion.

If you have ideas for enhancing our work, please reach out to me anytime at JAlexander@tmcc.edu. I value your input and I am here to serve.

Best wishes from Truckee Meadows Community College in sunny Reno, Nevada!