optiMize will be 100% online for 2020-2021!

Dear friends,

optiMize will deliver its programming 100% online for the 2020-2021 school year and we're super excited about our plans for some really innovative experiences! We hope you’ll join us in committing to build a supportive and loving community, and we hope that being part of optiMize — no matter where you're living — will be a ray of light for you in this challenging time.

Let’s talk about this.

There seems to be a common assumption that online experiences are inherently inferior. We feel very differently! We are confident that we can build communities for transformative education and social change online. We believe we can do this in ways that are not only effective, but also uniquely accessible and inclusive. 

As a student-led community, we believe this moment presents an opportunity to break ourselves from a status quo that was already broken in many ways. optiMize chooses to embrace the possibilities for innovation this year, and one thing we all might learn is that education doesn’t need to be tied to a single physical location. Imagine what is possible if the 500,000 living Michigan alumni join with current students, faculty, and staff for learning experiences that are diverse, dynamic, and accessible to all! Think what we can do when students from universities and community colleges across the state can collaborate at the click of a button. 

This summer, we ran our entire Summer Fellowship Program and all of our community college initiatives online. It was a necessary adaptation that turned out to be incredibly well-received by our students, staff, and mentors. All summer, we’ve been prototyping innovative ways to engage, collaborate, and take action together, even from a distance. We had mentors Zooming with us every week from places ranging from Detroit to Sao Paolo. We launched and ran our COVID-19 Community Aid Fund entirely digitally. Online engagement is already a major part of our work, and looking forward we are directing all of our resources to creating the greatest online experience we can imagine. We hope you’ll help us imagine that future.

Choosing to go exclusively online reduces risks to public health, stabilizes a common vision that won’t be disrupted at a moment’s notice, and empowers our entire community to commit all of our energy to working together on plans for an inspiring common experience. The decision has given us a calmer energy and a confidence that we will be able to deliver some really exciting programs. We hope that this notion of online engagement as inherently inferior will diminish following the experiments we and others undertake this year. We hope education leaders will embrace a positive narrative of possibility, and we hope thousands of students and mentors will join us in illuminating those possibilities. In the coming days we will announce more details about our plans for this year’s optiMize programs and open up opportunities for feedback and ideas from our community.

We’re not saying this year will be perfect. We’ve been working online for years, but we know we still have a lot to learn. There will be bumps in the road. But we also know we can do this together. Our community is loving, patient, and growth-oriented. We believe we’ll learn more crucial skills and innovative approaches this year than we have in any previous year. And by working together to show what’s possible this year, we will move the University of Michigan — and education more broadly — toward a future that became necessary long before COVID-19 existed. 

If we are to solve the world’s greatest challenges and make a just, sustainable, livable future possible, then we had better start creating a new future for education that allows everyone to participate and collaborate no matter where we’re located. We need lots of people working to create that future. So ask yourself, “Why not me?”

Now is the time to do it, and we hope you’ll join us. There’s no time to wait. 

See you next month.

optiMize