CREST hosted its Annual Retreat at the City College of New York’s (CCNY) Center for Workers Education (CWE) located at 25 Broadway, Manhattan, NY on October 11, 2024. The retreat was well attended by CREST Board of Directors, Associate Directors, affiliated Center Directors, CREST leadership & management and CREST graduate students.
The goal of the retreat was to revisit the CREST’s strategy toward growth, collaboration, and strengthening its role in addressing global and local challenges. During the retreat, attendees had constructive discussions and exchanged ideas, which resulted in the development of a strategic plan, robust ideas to foster cross-pillar collaborations, and a roadmap to fulfilling the institute’s mission and purpose.
CREST’s leadership, Dr. Reza Khanbilvardi and Dr. Shakila Merchant kicked off the retreat by encouraging attendees to self-reflect and share their progress toward their respective strategic pillar goals. During this session, each CREST pillar director shared their pillar activities, progress and challenges. Furthermore, while providing feedback on CREST’s 2025-2030 strategic plan, each pillar team was encouraged to design their own road map to success.
One of the key focuses of the retreat was to develop a workplan for cross-pillar collaboration. The session was co-led by Dr. Vartika C. Saman, CREST Research Scientist and Dr. Effie MacLachlan who helped team members of each pillar to not only identify their collaboration plan with other pillars but also develop a framework of the project they’d like to collaborate on including important details such as resources, budget, timeline etc. This laid the foundation of pillars interacting with each other to forward their goals and ultimately meet CREST’s mission.
Towards the end of the retreat, Drs. Merchant and Saman led a crucial session on understanding the attendee’s feedback on the structure of the retreat to be able to make improvements in the future.
Several productive ideas and action items emerged from the retreat that the institute plans to work on and develop during the upcoming semesters.
