About
The Southern Center for Broadening Participation in STEM
The Southern Center for Broadening Participation in STEM is a minority-led non-for-profit organization, working to enhance Educational Research, Policy, and Leadership to “Create New Possibilities in STEM college & career pathways for students,” specifically, the underserved and marginalized. The Southern Center promotes STEM research and workforce development activities, creating a culture of innovation, collaboration, and academic excellence among K-20 institutes, industry, colleges & universities, policy makers, and state education agencies.
In addition, The Southern Center provides support and guidance to teachers, faculty, staff and administrators, particularly those at HBCU’s and MSI’s, working to recruit, retain, and graduate students pursuing STEM degrees. These institutions provide superior mentorship and instruction, leading the nation in the production of STEM degrees among African American students.
Your generous donations will guarantee all students an opportunity to participate in STEM college and career pathways.
Mission
Increase the number of underserved and marginalized populations in STEM college & career pathways.
Vision
The realization of an equitable and culturally inclusive society.
Values
- Servant Leadership
- Diversity
- Equity & Inclusion
Our History
The Southern Center's Mission to Build Capacity
The formation of the Southern Center is the result of years of conversations with STEM colleagues, stakeholders, parents, students, policymakers, and workforce development professionals. The emerging theme was around our capacity, as minority-serving institutions, to substantively enhance the equity and inclusion of marginalized populations in STEM across education, industry, and policy environments. Many of you have shared your feelings of being unsupported, unappreciated, under-resourced, underpaid, and overwhelmed at your institutions. Often carrying the responsibility for publishing, presenting, advising, mentoring, and teaching hundreds of students a year, with little or no release time; many of you are simply burned-out. Prolonged emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion has become the norm at minority-serving institutions throughout the K-20 pipeline, pressured with meeting impractical assessment benchmarks.
The Southern Center’s primary objective is to assist education institutions and community-based organizations to increase STEM interest and retention among underserved and marginalized populations; to aid our colleagues in this important work. HBCUs and MSIs have been at the forefront of this effort exhausting vital resources faster than they can replenish them. As the Founder and Executive Director of the Southern Center, we are dedicated to supporting these national treasures, striving for the “equitable representation and inclusion of underrepresented minorities in STEM across every sector of our society.”
The significance of this moment amidst a viral and racial pandemic couldn’t be more urgent for HBCUs. Clayton Christensen and Kim B. Clark, Professors of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, predicted in their book, The Innovative University, that 50% of all colleges would close in the next decade as a result of “disruptions” to traditional higher education.
Even if these predictions are partially correct, given the global COVID-19 Pandemic, the rise of AI, online, and open-source learning opportunities, where does this leave our minority-serving institutions? Black America cannot afford to lose any of its minority-serving institutions. Representing only 3% of the nation’s colleges and universities, HBCU’s produce 20% of African American graduates. Twenty-five percent of all African American STEM majors complete at HBCUs. Currently, there are 101 HBCU’s remaining compared to 121 in 1930, a 17% decline, with the highest concentration (90) in the southern region of the United States (AL, GA, LA, TX, FL, TN, MS, NC, SC, AR, FL, OK).
The mission of the Southern Center is to provide support, guidance, and advocacy to administrators, faculty, and staff in K-12 through higher education settings, particularly, those seeking to recruit, retain, and graduate underrepresented minorities pursuing STEM college and career pathways. Capacity building is our essential practice, providing intentional programmatic and leadership support. “Creating New Possibilities in STEM.”