Selected faculty and administrators from across Puerto Rico’s 64 Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI’s) will come together to heal, learn, and grow. The pandemic has shown the importance of supporting faculty as a primary path to promoting student success. Faculty will learn from experts about how to create synergies from divergent ways of thinking and how to establish effective collective strategies to ultimately promote STEM student success. The conference will start hosting sessions to promote personal wellness and share tools to manage stress and burnout. We will celebrate our most successful programs within Puerto Rico and share their best practices!

After the celebration we will have a day of sustained dialogues on how we can create a Higher Ed Hub within Puerto Rico. Participants will be divided into teams and answer specific questions regarding their challenges regarding well-being, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging within their institutions. They will also be challenged to create consented decisions and stop having divergent ways as academic in the island. Experts in cultural responsiveness will provide professional development opportunities to improve faculty self-efficacy in application of culturally responsive practices and specialists in grant-writing and evaluation will provide didactic and experiential learning exercises aimed at improving proposal submissions and writing effective, competitive grants.