NDSU’s FORWARD project’s Advocates/Allies program has attracted significant interest and attention from other colleges and universities across the country. The national attention is a result of FORWARD’s efforts to share information about the Advocate/Allies program and its successes.
Members of FORWARD have generated awareness of the program through presentations, papers and poster sessions at a variety of national conferences and professional gatherings and supplemented these efforts through informal information sharing with colleagues at other institutions. The success of the Advocates/Allies program also is viewed as a tangible indication of the ways in which the FORWARD project has fostered broader institutional engagement in its goals.
The attractiveness of the program is reflected in invitations to conduct the training at other universities. Recently, three FORWARD Advocates provided training at two ADVANCE institutions. Tom Stone Carlson, associate professor of human development and family science; Rob Gordon, associate professor of psychology; and Roger Green, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, conducted three Ally training sessions at West Virginia University in August and two sessions at Lehigh University in early October.
FORWARD Advocates conducted their first on-site training at Louisiana Technical University in fall 2012, where more than 30 individuals participated in the training offered by Carlson and Chad Ulven, associate professor of mechanical engineering. The program continues to generate requests for on-site training, and sessions are being scheduled for the University of Maine.
Another indication of regard for this program is the invitation from the Women in Engineering Division of the American Society for Engineering Education for Green to provide a monthly “advocacy tip” for the organization’s newsletter. The tips will be archived on the Women in Engineering Division’s website, with links to the NDSU Advance FORWARD website.
As the program’s reputation grows, the FORWARD director continues to receive requests for information about the program, including, most recently, from the Ohio State University.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.