A Look at Scholar’s Voice™ Retreats

History of Retreats In Our Company

We use the word ‘retreat’ in the way we talk about things because it encapsulates the feeling that we at Scholar’s Voice™ want our work with clients to have, which is a stepping back, or a stepping away. The word ‘retreat’ has such a different energy to it than many programs that you might hear about out there like a boot camp or an intensive.

I started off my own journey with retreats with a virtual 2-week retreat called the Writing Sprint Blueprint and then moved to actual in-person writing retreats in Puerto Rico. These were retreats I put on by myself. 

Finally, we transitioned in January of 2020 as a team to a conference style retreat where we got to be in-person with clients and teach and write together in a beautiful San Juan location. 

During the pandemic, we did move to virtual retreats for a season.

The Future of Retreats for Scholar’s Voice™

As we’re making so many changes this year, and becoming Scholar’s Voice™ as the next iteration of our company, we wanted to keep the retreats in there somehow, which is how we landed on the Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreats.

This episode’s purpose is to give you an image of what it might be like to have one of these retreats on your campus.

Our Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreat is really meant for those of you who have listened to and enjoyed the content from the podcasts or my book, and you would like to participate in some kind of program with us.

The Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreat is that program for you because it will be free to you. It is paid for by your university.

The Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreat

The Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreat comes in 2 formats: a 2 day in-person or a 2 day, (3 hour per day) virtual event.

There are so many options for how a university might want to use a tool like The Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreat to attract and retain faculty, which is our main messaging for administration.

Content of The Scholar’s Voice™ Retreat

Most universities don’t really know how to support faculty, especially women, nonbinary faculty, and any kind of minoritized faculty members or traditionally excluded groups.

Rather than a one-off type of workshop, our goal is to provide training that is longer so that we can go deep and get in-depth with your university on how to care for and support their staff in order to retain them. After the retreat, we continue to develop a relationship with your university where they can fund you into some of our other programs in order to continue supporting your career.

The place that we get the best traction is with people who deeply understand diversity, equity and inclusion work, so it is essential to bring this type of content through our retreats.

As Scholar’s Voice™, we see our work is doing equity work, because we are explicitly anti-patriarchal. We are explicitly teaching methods that center our clients and help them to stand in their agency, and help them to create proactively the careers that they want.

The idea is that our retreats are going to be attractive to your administrators because they do these things because they help with retention, and because the administrators can get more training that is going to help support this group of faculty who have been traditionally marginalized.

During the retreat, we walk through creating academic mission statement. Then we will talk about how to use that academic mission statement to find time to write and to align your activities and calendar behind the academic mission statement and make choices about your career that is in line with your articulated academic mission.

How to Get This Retreat on Your Campus

All you need to do is to write an email, and copy us on the email. Identify who you think is the best person who is going to be behind the idea of a Scholar’s Voice™ Retreat on your campus.

We’ve had a lot of success with DEI initiatives, but that is by no means the only avenue to have us come to your campus.

We then set up a short call to discuss with your university person and make a plan.

Follow up is important in making a retreat a reality, so our team member, Paulette, can help you at support@scholarsvoice.org

We look forward to seeing you either on your campus or virtually soon!

 “Retreats invite reflection, and they invite thoughtfulness. Nobody is rushed during a retreat. It’s stepping out of busyness; it’s stepping out of rush.”

“I think the key to faculty retention is targeted support.”

Download Our University Retreats Brochure: 

We’ve created our faculty development retreats so you and the rest of your colleagues can work together to come up with ways to make the faculty experience better for everyone at your institution. These can be either in person or virtual and would be a great option if you aren’t able to participate in one of our traditional programs. 

Check out our Scholar’s Voice™ Faculty Development Retreats here!

Continue the conversation:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. Want to train with us for free on your campus? Now you can when you recommend our Scholar’s Voice Faculty Retreats to a decision-maker on your campus! Download the brochure with the retreat curriculum and both in-person and online retreat options here.

Read the transcript here.