letter from the UIF team

OH, HEY, THIS IS A YEARBOOK

Dear Fellows and Faculty Champions,

This year, you’re part of an experiment to publish stories, photos, reflections and more from your cohort.

Creating this yearbook not only made us smile — it helped us synthesize data and understand your perspectives as we continue to make the University Innovation Fellows program the best it can be.

We hope that reading this will help you feel more connected to the amazing humans who make up our community, and that the stories inside will inspire you to continue doing epic sh*t at your schools.

This year brought many changes to the way we do our work as well as changes to the program.

On the program side, we’ve started to use new contact management and communication tools to better organize ourselves and the ways we connect with you.

We shared with you three toolkits to help you make an impact at your schools: The Innovator’s Toolkit: Design Thinking, Collaborate to Escape, and Prototyping with Algorithms. You can find the links to these on page 50 of this yearbook. We worked with our d.school colleagues to create the Escape and Algorithms toolkits, and we look forward to more collaborations that will benefit the UIF community.

Of course, we have to mention our biggest experiment of the year, and one that was out of our control. The coronavirus pandemic forced us to cancel our March Silicon Valley Meetup. To help you continue to enhance your change agent skills, we held our first online meetup in March and first virtual accelerator in April. We plan to hold more online experiences that bring this global movement to you at your homes, where we hope you’re staying safe and healthy.

Being part of this community of change agents constantly inspires us. It’s for you that we come to work every day and put our full selves into the what we do. We can’t wait to see the impact you make in the world!

Hugs,

The UIF team Leticia, Humera, Laurie, Lupe and Ghanashyam