Meet Dean Shim

The word “strategic” is used to mean a lot of different things.
What does “strategy” mean to you?

We all operate within a larger system. To succeed, you need to find your niche.

So strategy begins with self-assessment: know your strengths, know what makes you unique. Then match those strengths and unique qualities to existing needs and opportunities.

I’ll share some examples of what I mean.

One of our most important resources at the School of Human Ecology is the Child Development Lab. It’s valuable for families and researchers, and it is something unique on campus. Of course, the university has a mandate to serve our communities, and Wisconsin has many struggling families. Matching our strengths to these needs was my inspiration for the Prenatal to Five initiative at the intersection of:

• A statewide need to improve childhood well-being
• UW’s land-grant mandate to disseminate knowledge for public good
• Studies demonstrating that interventions in the earliest years of a child’s life can yield profound, far-reaching returns
• SoHE’s unique strengths in childhood development, including the Child Development Lab and extensive research on parenting, childhood health, digital learning in childhood, and more

Another example, the campus created the Native American Environment, Health, and Community Cluster to better connect with sovereign Native Nations, and one thing learned through that work was that tribal communities wanted more support in meeting the needs of their youth and families.

The School of Human Ecology has cultivated a good reputation among Indigenous cultures working with Native American students. So we’ve leveraged our strengths in child and family well-being in another way with the Indigenous EcoWell Initiative, building on the work of Paul Robbins of the Nelson Institute, who brought together Chiefs and Native leaders to address environmental issues.

Those meetings also surfaced a desire from Native American community leaders for more work to meet the needs of Indigenous youth and families.

This need in the community dovetailed strategically with work by SoHE’s Department of Civil Society & Community Studies engaged with tribal communities, research through the Child Development Lab, and extensive scholarship within the Department of Human Development & Family Studies.

One more example began with our Personal Finance major. Again, this is something unique to the School of Human Ecology — there is nothing similar on campus. And we have scholars with deep expertise in financial literacy, including my own APLUS study on financial knowledge and well-being.

Who needs financial literacy? Everybody! Particularly college students. So aligning our strengths with that need on campus led to the School of Human Ecology’s Financial Life Skills Course, which has reached more than 3,750 students across campus since its inception and continues to be in high demand each semester.

The success of the Financial Life Skills Course, available to all UW students, from incoming freshman to outgoing, job-hunting graduates, is the outcome of strategically connecting:

• The general need for greater financial knowledge and skills among college students
• SoHE’s unique strengths in personal finance, including the Personal Finance major, the APLUS study, and other research on financial literacy and efficacy

Not only has it become one of the most popular classes on campus, its creation also demonstrated SoHE’s commitment to being a strong campus partner.

As a result, SoHE was well positioned to expand the Personal Finance Major to offer University of Wisconsin–Madison’s first fully online degree.

One more thing: While each of these examples illustrates the strategy of connecting strengths to needs and opportunities, it’s important to remember that strategy alone is not enough. You also need actionable goals!

For example, one of our goals has been to raise the profile of the School of Human Ecology – on campus as well as nationally within the field. Each of the examples I mentioned helped us advance that goal.

Without goals to move toward, strategy will just sit on a shelf collecting dust! Success is the point where strategy and goals converge.

In recent years, especially following the unrest of 2020, many organizations took a hard look at issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion for the first time. What has engaging on DEI meant for you and for SoHE?

A Personal Journey

I continue to learn and grow as a leader, and one example is how the early months of the pandemic helped me see my leadership role in a new light.

Of course, 2020 was a year of many crises in the U.S. We saw surging white nationalism, in part a response to Black Lives Matter, but also many Asian Americans faced threats and violence sparked by conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

For me, that became a year of personal discovery. When I saw the reports and videos of Asian women and men being attacked, it made me see how protected I am in my daily work and life.

It also sparked a journey for my family, as my husband and I for the first time talked at length with our adult children about their experiences as Asian Americans, growing up and even today.

Through all of that, I saw that in some ways, because I have always been a very confident person, I hadn’t fully reckoned with what it means to be an immigrant, a minority, and a woman in our society, and the vulnerabilities those identities often mean for so many people.

I share this because empathy and authenticity are essential in leadership.

But if I am closed off in some ways from my own experiences and identity, how can I be my authentic self? And if I don’t allow myself to explore those vulnerabilities as they relate to me, how can I understand the vulnerabilities that others feel?

This was new territory for me, but that’s how we grow. For me, it was a new lens on leadership — one that I gratefully embrace and one where my personal journey continues.

Workplace DEI

Working on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion is not something any organization can achieve overnight. For change to be meaningful and sustainable, it needs a long-term vision with clearly defined and achievable shorter-term goals.

Step One: Vision, Mission & Strategic Goals

Because diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is so important, we knew that we had to make it part of our fundamental vision and planning, starting with clearly defining what we wanted to achieve.

When we created our One SoHE21 10-year Strategic Plan, we defined our vision for DEI as ensuring that the School of Human Ecology was an inclusive, welcoming environment to all.

Of course, this was not something we could achieve overnight. It was a long-term vision, and to create lasting change would mean breaking that vision down into specific, achievable goals and the steps we would need to take to reach each one.

Step 2: Learning Community & Recruitment

Once we had established our vision for workplace DEI, we needed to better understand where we were starting from and the challenges we would face.

We created a school-wide learning community, but with the key understanding that when it comes to learning, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

We held town hall meetings, we created workshops and supported outside trainings, we formed book clubs — by providing a variety of opportunities, we allowed everybody to learn in their own way and grow at their own pace.

We also knew that becoming more diverse would not just happen on its own. We had to be intentional about recruitment for faculty and staff, as well as in our outreach to potential students to build a more diverse community.

Step 3: Retention with Substantive Programmatic Platforms

We were actually very successful in recruiting — not just faculty, but also building greater diversity among advisors and other key roles for student support.

That happened fairly quickly, but one of the biggest mistakes people make — including myself early on — is not understanding that recruitment is just a beginning. It’s not that difficult to recruit diverse faculty and students. What’s much more challenging is retaining them.

People need to be doing work that’s meaningful to them, not in an isolated way but as part of a broad coalition invested in the same goals. This is where substantive programmatic platforms are vital.

You can’t simply have Black or Native American or LGBTQ faculty working on issues for those communities. You need platforms that bring together diverse groups across the organization, driven not by individual identities but by content and what they want to achieve.

A great example of this is our Equity and Justice Network — “E&JNet” — which offers a platform for faculty, students, and staff to work together for change. So we’re connecting people from across programs and across the school — anyone can participate — and supporting them in social justice projects they create because they’re issues that they care about personally and want to make a difference.

Step 4: Change Agents & Renewed Commitment

The other mistake I think organizations make is that once they reach these goals — they’ve provided opportunities for learning, they’ve achieved more diversity through recruitment and created platforms that bring diverse groups together — at that point, they may think their work is done. It’s not.

When you’ve achieved those goals, that is the time to return to step one and continue the work, but at an even higher level.

This is when you establish new leaders, champions, and change agents who can carry the work forward and take on higher-order challenges.

I think of it as a spiral staircase. You start at the bottom with a vision and goals for a certain amount of time, and as you achieve that vision you continue climbing higher — the same circular path, but at a higher level.

Has the vision changed? Does it need to become something larger? You establish new goals for recruitment and for platforms that bring people together and create even greater impact.

This is where we are today — 10 years from where we started — renewing our commitment and thinking about how we can continue to improve and continue to make a difference, now at a greater and higher level.

The School of Human Ecology has forged a number of strategic partnerships over the past several years. As a leader, how do you approach collaboration?

The bulk of what I’ve been able to accomplish so far has been achieved through building partnerships. As I’ve said, a vision and mission are critical. You also need strategies and goals for achieving your mission, teams built on trust, and systems that help everyone succeed.

But even with all of these things, very few organizations have all of the resources they need to achieve their goals on their own. We reach our goals not only by focusing on outcomes, but also by sharing that focus with partners who have similar goals and complementary resources.

Of course, building partnerships is a lot of work! You need to seek people out, bring them together, share your vision, and help them see how working together you can each achieve more. You need to show them what you can do for them and define what you need from them.

It takes work, and it takes patience! But the results are more than worth it.

When people see what partnerships make possible, they get inspired! That’s when great things can happen.

Our Mind-Body & Family Well-Being Initiative, in partnership with the Center for Healthy Minds, is an excellent example. Each side offered unique and complementary strengths, so we pulled them together into an even stronger partnership. I knew that SoHE could advance their work through our Child Development Lab and faculty expertise on children and families, in particular the scholarship of Julie Poehlmann-Tynan a clinical child-psychologist and SoHE’s Dorothy A. O’Brien Chair in Human Ecology,

This partnership also helped fortify our efforts to recruit Larissa Duncan, now SoHE’s Elizabeth C. Davies Chair in Child and Family Well-Being, and Dr. Charles Raison, who held the Mary Sue and Mike Shannon Distinguished Chair for Healthy Minds, Children, and Families.

Another example is the School of Human Ecology’s leadership on Design Thinking and Innovation. Design Thinking was gaining importance nationally, and I knew that UW-Madison  should be graduating students trained to think creatively about how to make a difference in the world. The school had amazing assets to contribute, but they were underutilized and confined to our small Design Studies program. So I sought partners.

The establishment of the Design Thinking initiative at UW–Madison illustrates the power of partnerships built on mutual advantage and opportunity, fusing parallel tracks of activity on campus to create something new and exciting.

– Provost John Karl Scholz, October 28, 2021

As Design Thinking gained traction in higher education across the country, I knew that SoHE had relevant assets unique to the UW system, including:

• Courses and scholarship through the Department of Design Studies
• The Interior Architecture and Textile & Fashion Design undergraduate majors
• The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection (HLATC), which SoHE had recently transitioned to a newly constructed, state-of-the-art archive and gallery space for its more than 13,000 artifacts spanning 1,600 years

At the same time, it was clear that the Textile Collection was underutilized and that these assets alone were not enough to establish a meaningful foundation for Design Thinking work at UW-Madison. 

I am proud that today the Design Thinking initiative at UW-Madison includes: 

• The Master’s Degree in Design + Innovation as a collaboration among five schools and colleges
• The Center for Design & Material Culture (CDMC)
• An elevated role for HLATC across campus as a resource for students, curricula, and researchers 
• SoHE certificate programs in Textiles & Design and Design Strategy

In addition to support from SoHE alumna Elizabeth Holloway Schar and her husband Mark (introduced to Design Thinking through his alma mater, Stanford University), The Chipstone Foundation continues to be a key partner for the UW-Madison Design Thinking initiative.

For The Chipstone Foundation, which funded recruitment of Executive Director Sarah Anne Carter to lead the CDMC, the material culture represented within the Textile Collection offers an important complement to its renown collections of early American furniture, historical American prints, and early English and American ceramics. 

Chipstone’s relationship with SoHE also opens doors for new perspectives and scholarship within the foundation’s educational programming, which is directed by graduate students at US universities.

From vision to reality was an eight-year journey, but that time also allowed for the right people and supporters to get behind our vision and make our work even stronger. Today, as a result, Design Thinking has a home base on campus and is taking off in ways we never imagined.

Under your leadership, the School of Human Ecology has benefited from fundraising far beyond anything in its long history. What are the keys to your success in development?

What I’ve learned over many years in higher education is that successful fundraising grows out of building partnerships through trust and commitment, and I explain that in six principles that define how I approach this very important part of leadership responsibilities.

1. Clearly Define Your Vision

To begin, you need a very clear idea of what you want to accomplish and where you want to go. And that vision should be for the highest level of what you want to accomplish. Never compromise quality. It’s better to work with less in the present than to sacrifice your long-term vision for the best.

2. Be Passionate & Sincere

When you share that vision, when you talk about what you want to accomplish, let people feel your passion for it. Let them see how much it matters to you. I cannot win support if I’m not passionate about what I’m doing. Everybody has to see that you’re genuinely excited about what you want to achieve.

3. Understand Your Benefactors

I said at the start that fundraising is about building partnerships. Especially if you envision something substantial, It takes many people coming together. So from the start, you need to work to truly understand the people who could become your benefactors.

Everyone has their own interests. You need to discover theirs. What is important to them, and why?

You have to ask good questions, but listening is just as important. If you simply tell someone about what you want without really understanding what they want, that potential donor will go somewhere else.

4. Cultivate a Shared Vision

Once you understand what matters to your potential benefactors, you need to find how their interests and values connect with what you want to accomplish, identify where your interests overlap.

Of course, sometimes that overlap just isn’t there. There have been times I’ve turned down gifts because they weren’t a good fit with the vision.

But almost always, you will discover your authentic shared interests. It can require helping others also see those connections. It’s your job to cultivate that understanding and help benefactors see why a certain kind of investment is important.

In the end—and this is vital—it’s no longer your vision, and it’s not their vision. It has to become your shared vision.

5. Make the Ask

When you have built up those relationships and worked together to find and define a shared vision, you need to ask for the gift.

You need to say clearly: Here’s where we’re going, here’s what you care about, here’s what we could do together, here’s how you can help.

To be honest, the first time I took on a large development goal, I had a hard time asking people to give money. But this is why a shared vision is so important. Asking for a gift becomes not about getting into their pockets but helping them do something they feel good about.

It took a while for me to understand that, but over the years, many donors have said to me, “I’m so excited about what you’ve done for me. This is the best thing I could be doing, and it means so much to me to leave this legacy.”

6. Be Accountable for Impact

Fundraisers can be so focused on bringing money in, they often forget that what they do after is even more important in those relationships.

You have to show your benefactors—at this point, your partners in a shared vision—that you are a good steward of their investment. Not in general terms, but specifically: Here’s what I’ve done with your gift, we were able to do this, this, and this. Here is your direct impact.

When you are accountable in this way and show their investment at work, you strengthen the relationship, you validate their trust, and you honor the personal values and interests that were the inspiration for their gift.