From crisis management to multi-level interinstitutional partnerships: Development of the southeastern conference deans nursing coalition

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) Nursing Dean's Coalition is a purposeful alliance organized to collaboratively address several challenges that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last three years, this strategic team of academic leaders has evolved from a crisis response team to a multidimensional support team, leveraging both individual and collective strengths, to provide several benefits to the dean members, as well as other SEC nursing faculty members, students, and institutions. Participation has grown from the original 12 deans to engage a broader team of associate deans and nurse leaders in faculty development, research, service, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article describes the origin, evolution, and outcomes of this coalition to date, as well as visions for the future.


Keywords:
Coalition building Academic nursing Interinstitutional partnerships Professional development Leadership Academic deans

A B S T R A C T
The Southeastern Conference (SEC) Nursing Dean's Coalition is a purposeful alliance organized to collaboratively address several challenges that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last three years, this strategic team of academic leaders has evolved from a crisis response team to a multidimensional support team, leveraging both individual and collective strengths, to provide several benefits to the dean members, as well as other SEC nursing faculty members, students, and institutions. Participation has grown from the original 12 deans to engage a broader team of associate deans and nurse leaders in faculty development, research, service, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article describes the origin, evolution, and outcomes of this coalition to date, as well as visions for the future.
Across the globe, academic nurse leaders had to quickly pivot and rethink their vision and strategic goals to not only survive, but to thrive during times of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Academic professional values and ethics have been challenged to cope with new ways of managing unprecedented changes, constant disruption and volatile situations for faculty, staff, and students. Early in March 2020, 12 Southeastern Conference (SEC) nursing deans decided to come together virtually to discuss the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Initially envisioned as an opportunity for "sharing and caring" about the academic and personal toll of the pandemic, other epic national crises emerged including gun violence, racial and ethnic inequities, and workforce shortages that impacted the work of academic nurse leaders.
While several SEC deans had existing professional and/or personal relationships, this was the first organized attempt to bring 12 American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) member schools together for monthly virtual meetings. Over the last two years, a strategic coalition has emerged from addressing the onslaught of national academic challenges through a spirit of collaboration to foster a greater sense of direction and re-envision the future of SEC academic nursing. Leveraging individual and collective strengths yields benefits across institutions. Group outcomes to date have been advanced through developing trust, intentional coalition building, leveraging expertise, and expanding multi-level networks to advance the academic missions. Coalition members believe valuing the strengths and leveraging the collective pool of SEC talent, makes a positive impact on leadership agility to pivot and adjust goals for professional advancement of educators, researchers, practitioners, and leaders.

Overview of SEC schools of nursing
The SEC Deans Coalition consists of deans from colleges and schools of nursing in the Southeastern Conference. The SEC was originally established in 1933 as an athletic association whose members are located primarily in the Southeast United States. With this athletic origin, the member schools have a long history of fierce competition, rather than collaboration; however, in 2005, the members created the SEC Academic Consortium, which was later branded as SECU to promote research, scholarship, leadership development, and the academic achievements of faculty and students in these universities. The SEC was initially composed of ten members and has expanded membership twice to include 14 institutions (see Table 1 for institution descriptors). Twelve of the 14 SEC institutions have affiliated schools of nursing. All of the participating schools of nursing are located in institutions that hold a Carnegie designation of Doctoral Universities with Very High Research Activity. Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, and Vanderbilt have affiliated Academic Health Sciences Centers where the primary school of nursing is located. Vanderbilt University is the only Private (not-for-profit) institution.

Coalition building
Success strategies for coalition building published by nurse leaders more than a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic identified a founding principle as rallying around a common issue that impacts the public's health (McKay & Hewlett, 2009). The pandemic provided the impetus for the SEC Deans Coalition. An exchange of phone calls with fellow deans across the conference highlighted the need to establish a larger network of mutual support and to share strategies among large institutions in this geographical region with shared political, economic, and social challenges. Members were invited and convened with the SEC Dean of South Carolina providing leadership with the first virtual meeting in March 2020.
Intentional coalition building began with introductions and agenda co-creation. Recognizing the varied responses of clinical partners, universities and states to the pandemic, the group quickly discovered the added value of sharing experiences and contributing ideas on collaboration within the university and with external partners in response to evolving policies and to lead and engage in COVID mitigation in areas such as testing and contact tracing. While the member schools have many commonalities, the diversity of the schools and geographic locations provided a rich forum to discuss solutions to disruption in classroom and clinical experiences for students and other issues such as remote work for faculty and staff.
The group evolved with an expanding agenda focused on areas of agreement on how working together could leverage resources in the network for common goals. Conversations quickly moved beyond COVID mitigation to identifying broader points of collaboration. Faculty development emerged as a priority for the coalition and a needs assessment survey was developed to identify priority topics of value across institutions. The growth in collaboration via virtual meetings and the focus area of faculty development served as a catalyst for expanding the mission and vision of the group at an in-person strategic planning retreat.

Retreat -catalyzing trust and social capital
A two-day retreat affirmed the deans' professional and personal benefits of the Coalition and provided a forum for disruption of the status quo with more purposeful intentionality and engagement of interinstitutional stakeholders (Herman, 2016). The in-person retreat was hosted by a member school dean at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and attended by six of the 12-member school deans. The agenda catalyzed the progress and forward-thinking vision of the group beginning with dedicated time for trust building and sharing both grand challenges and big ideas. Although there were many common goals and aspirations, historically deans and his/her schools of nursing in the same region compete for faculty, students, grant funding, and other regional and/or national resources and recognition. The group recognized the value of trust not only to enhance engagement and knowledge sharing (Kosonen & Ikonen, 2022), but also as a means to role model and bolster social capital, inspire innovation, and to adopt best practices (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020). The collaboration discussions generated several potential initiatives and opportunities for information and strategy sharing ( Table 2). The group began to coalesce on strategies that could be leveraged among their talented teams with shared resources (both financial and human capital). The table below includes additional areas of collaboration that emerged over the next year of the SEC Deans Coalition.
As an outcome of the retreat, the members decided to formally organize as a SEC Dean's Coalition with plans to establish interinstitutional and inclusive committees over time to distribute and empower leadership and collaboration opportunities among the member schools. The first major initiative became a planned faculty development series. Data from the faculty development surveys were shared and discussed and plans were made to identify faculty development leaders from each institution to serve on a collaboration workgroup (Fernandez & Shaw, 2020).
The inaugural convening SEC dean, from the University of South Carolina, was selected to chair the Coalition with responsibility to take the lead on organizing monthly SEC dean's meetings virtually for the next academic year, to convene and charge the professional development leaders across 12 institutions, initiate similar Coalitions when ready of other groups (i.e., academics, business) and to keep efforts focused on the established priorities.

Leveraging expertise
Leveraging the collective experiences and wisdom of the SEC Dean's Coalition members has contributed to the success of the group. Most of the deans have been leading academic programs for many years; in fact, the average tenure as a nursing dean is 10.5 years. The first collective initiative among the member schools was to create a venue to provide professional development for the collective SEC member schools' faculty members. The SEC Professional Development Committee was appointed through a call for volunteers from the SEC Nursing programs; all 12 SEC schools provided committee members. This committee reviewed the Faculty Interest Survey results from 451 responses in the three focus areas: Teaching, scholarship and professional development (unpublished data, 2021). Based on the survey findings and the collective wisdom of the SEC Professional Development Committee members it was decided that four 60-min virtual educational sessions would be held during the 2021-2022 academic year. These sessions included presenters from multiple SEC nursing programs and focused on the following topics: "Tips on Scholarly Writing", Social Determinants of Health", "Work-Life Balance", and "Equity, Diversity and Inclusion." Continuing education units were offered to those who participated for a cost of ten dollars. An average of 75 to 80 faculty members participated in each session and the offerings were recorded and placed "on-demand" for others to view at their convenience. Feedback on these sessions was positive overall with 87-96 % of participants who agreed or strongly agreed that the sessions met their expectations, were relevant to their work and could be applied in their roles. This initiative is ongoing and educational sessions are currently being planned for the next academic year.
Besides professional development, additional priority areas identified for inter-institutional collaboration were research infrastructure and productivity, accreditation and the new AACN Essentials, business operations and budget, and DEI opportunities, including recruitment and retention of faculty, staff, and students, and their success in the respective colleges of nursing. Fig. 1 demonstrates progress to date on steps in formalizing these groups. For example, the associate deans for academics have been holding monthly virtual meetings since 2021 to discuss challenges and opportunities impacting their departments, and they are meeting at national conferences. Several have served as consultants for others with accreditation processes and have facilitated campus visits with other SEC schools among program directors and other academic leaders to share best practices.
The research and scholarship leaders from the member colleges met at a regional nursing research conference in spring 2021, and have continued their network, but have not yet formalized a group Coalition. Budget and operations personnel met at the AACN Bonus meeting (2021) and ongoing communication among those professionals continues through informal channels. Additional initiatives include facilitating the formal adoption of these interest groups, with plans this year to connect SEC leaders of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Long-term, the coalition plans to further link and network SEC faculty and students through shared electronic interest groups and face-to-face meetings.

Benefits from the dean's collaboration
The SEC Deans collaboration is the generative formation of a SEC coalition of nursing schools/colleges. The SEC coalition is a purposeful, intentional alliance organized to advance a common mission among the SEC nursing schools. One of the major benefits for the deans have been sharing information across schools as described in Table 2 to enhance best practices, new solutions, and/or alternative strategies. At least two to three times a month, a dean will poll the group for a policy or question about certain operations that he/she may be addressing in his/her college. Within hours, deans share documents and now utilize a Microsoft Teams folder to archive documents. As a result of this sharing, deans have used these documents to inform school reorganization into departments, mentoring programs, revised tenure and promotion policies, DEI leadership positions, state legislative "asks", and others in their respective schools. Deans have also shared talented faculty for onsite or virtual consultations on research, mentoring, and accreditation. Deans utilize the SEC travel funds or their own school funds to send newly appointed associate deans and program directors to another school to explore academic and research infrastructures. The group has also supported the well-being of deans during this disruptive time in our history. One dean stated about her experience with the group: "Its really hard to quantify the benefits of the group, but from a qualitative perspective, I knew I could be authentic and vulnerable with my peers. I didn't have to the be the 'strong leader.' I could be myself." The collaborative has not only supported deans, but also has extended to faculty. For example, one school partnered with a higher research-intensive school to establish a faculty mentoring program with senior research faculty at the research-intensive school for junior faculty at the partnering school. The professional development series described earlier met a collective gap among all SEC schools and provided training and support for SEC nursing faculty. Similar to the deans group, faculty members who have participated in the working groups as described in Fig. 1 have reported qualitative benefits with the networking and supportive collaboration. A summary of benefits from this coalition is outlined in Table 3.

Next steps
With the pandemic crisis and the related needs to facilitate student progress, to ensure graduates for the workforce, and to survive uncertainties, nursing deans, and other academic colleagues across the SEC united, embraced, and discovered new benefits by building an SEC Coalition. Reflecting and now looking forward, this coalition is considering the following next steps: Create a robust infrastructure for the coalition to provide content, share, upload, search, and deliver During the pandemic, collaborative professional development opportunities and activities were embraced, going forward, we need to continue to the collaborative efforts that have been produced during this time. For example, the shared model of professional development was created for "just-in-time-learning" and adopting new teaching practices particularly using virtual simulations and other online and "new" teaching solutions/strategies while in COVID. Next step for the consortium with the foundational work being done, is to refine the infrastructure for the coalition so faculty can share content, be guest lectures, and propel the expertise across various schools within the consortium.
Having a robust infrastructure, e.g., a portal, search engine, an easy method to provide content that is peer-reviewed, and easily retrieved for use across the schools would be needed. An exploration of this model would be a next step; using a collaborative portal will allow tracking of usage, evaluations, outcomes, and competencies.

Create a structure to recognize excellent educators and leaders within the consortium (in the past and going forward)
Through the coalition so many educators and leaders stepped up to the challenge to work together. The work was not siloed or pitted against each other, rather it was collaborative, empowering, and fostered teamwork and appreciation for others within the SEC Coalition. Reflecting on this hard work and overcoming challenges, how can we recognize the leaders, the excellent educators, not only during the pandemic, but going forward. There are few opportunities at this time to recognize stellar faculty and leaders, a specific mechanism is needed to do this going forward as a demonstration to award and highlight those who contributed in a meaningful, impactful way.

Leveraging colleges, policy leaders, and a united nursing voice
Across the southern states in the SEC, nursing voices must unite to change healthcare policies and to bring about change in our profession, healthcare delivery, and nursing education. Organized efforts through policy leaders within the SEC Coalition could create a working group of interested faculty across the consortium to set goals, prioritize and lean in to make a difference and have a collective voice when change is needed. There are so many changes and opportunities for a nursing voice, leveraging and uniting in this consortium would be one strategy to do this.

Create a shared resource and purchasing model where the SEC Coalition could leverage group purchasing power for equipment, memberships, and materials needed within nursing schools
Often, leaders within the schools are purchasing similar items, equipment, materials, and using the same vendors, e.g., remote proctoring. Through collaborative efforts, better pricing, discounts, and group purchases can be initiated and evaluated by the coalition. By using this model, it would be a win-win situation for the vendor and member schools since discounts could be provided, but through the collaborative model, marketing across the 14 schools of the product, the equipment could be purchased. Group training with faculty could also be achieved and more robust evaluations across the coalition could be done and data provided on the usage, the benefits, and best practices when using the product.
Enhance shared governance and improves policies by leveraging the work being done across the coalition Now that many students are returning and progressing in nursing programs in somewhat a normal manner, many SEC nursing leaders have needs to create new infrastructures, processes, and/or operations within their schools. Instead of reinventing the wheel, coalition members are learning from each other; avoiding the pitfalls and embracing tips from a journey previously traveled in another school or program. Creating this trusting, helpful, and supportive environment, and culture has been very important and evolved from this collaborative work. The next step is to keep the trust and support alive since the establishment of this strong foundation during the pandemic.
This model may be duplicated in other regions with schools nationally or internationally that share similar size, missions, organizational structures, and socio-political climates. The dean coalition complements the AACN national infrastructure, yet formalizes a smaller group of regional partners with similar needs. In our case, we organized from an existing athletic conference, but could be duplicated regionally with other "like" schools. All SEC deans attend the AACN deans conference in March and October each year and utilize the event to assemble at least once during the meeting to keep our shared agendas moving forward. Three of the SEC deans serve on the AACN board, which facilitates a reciprocal exchange of ideas, challenges, and initiatives between the formal national organization and the regional coalition.
Overall, there are many opportunities and benefits by being part of a dean coalition, particularly this SEC nursing school group, as discussed and demonstrated in this article. Organizational efficiency and effectiveness can increase through the mutual sharing of expertise. With today's challenges, not just the pandemic, but major changes in the nursing profession, in higher education, and with the ever-changing healthcare landscape, this multi-interinstitutional partnership has not only been helpful but has exceeded expectations. Increased reach and influence within the SEC region Expanding sphere of stakeholder diversity Leveraging access to additional resourcesfaculty expertise; administrative expertise, support, peer mentoring, and policy resources Enhancing efficiencies of inter-institutional collaboration Developing a network infrastructure for collaboration, consultation, and academic partnerships Reducing redundancies Enhancing SEC regional credibility and advocacy potential Winning on more fronts than a single school working alone and increasing the potential for success Bringing more expertise and resources to bear on complex issues, where the resources of any one school would not be sufficient Developing a structure for faculty development and advancement of new faculty leaders Elevating the voice of academic nursing as a collective group of committed educators, researchers, clinicians and leaders. Working through a shared understanding of issues and learning from each other to strengthen individual colleges/schools. Increasing available resources, physical and financial, by expanding access to the contacts, connections, and relationships Uniting for a sustainable base for change, contributions, strategies to improve nursing education, clinical practice, and research outcomes Facilitating sharing and adopting best practices Inspiring one another to make larger impact Dean and faculty support and well-being