Welcome to the CareFull Scholars Program, where the idea of self-care is as important as the scholarship. Because you have an interest in academic interventions that may focus on minoritized students, your empirical research studies, concept papers, opinion pieces or review articles are needed now more than ever. In fact, we posit that "radical" self care is absolutely necessary for the high quality manuscripts, grant proposals, practice briefs, book chapters, edited volumes that can come from a scholar's mind that is clear and focused instead of stressed-out and overwhelmed.

We are honored to serve as a catalyst for this monumental shift in your relationship to writing and the practices that we will learn together to get you from where ever you are now to where you want to be.  We begin with our 25+5 daily writing as process. This  simple, but not necessarily easy practice calls for writing 25 minutes every week day followed by 5 minutes of reflection and transition and is based on the Pomodoro method. We begin with writing to declutter and not with a specific product as a goal. For this foundational step, the process itself, is the desired outcome.

In addition to the 25+5 daily writing practice, the CareFull Scholars program promotes a fundamental and unapologetic focus on Self and Collective Care. We will meet on Zoom on 

Wednesday afternoons or evenings for weekly 30 minute CareFull Check-Ins. The purpose of these calls will be to authenticate the changes in work/life balance as a result of integrating contemplative practices into our real life, including the possibility of the the writing process as sanctum. We see these calls as necessary for the cultivating and caring of the scholar's mind. 

Finally, because we believe that the human mind is ultimately a product of relationships, our monthly community gatherings will encourage authentic relating and community building around a collaborative work. Our platform is the Open Science Framework, combined with shared Google files. OSF allows for our collaborative writing process to be catalogued as well as providing a "citable" work, even while the work is being developed.  Shared Google files provide easy access to material as we regularly and asynchronously "meet on the page." 
Our goal is for each participant to be cited on a completed scholarly product by July 31, 2022. 

There will also be opportunities to contribute to the work of the HBCU STEM-US Center. The CareFull Scholars Program is housed in the Analytic Hub, the collaborative research arm of the Center. Working with our external HBCU partners, we study what academic interventions work at HBCU's and why they work.  The Hub is committed to intellectual rigor and producing scholarship that is relevant, high quality, and forward-thinking. Moreover we seek to promote asset-based framing of academic intervention research at HBCUs. We couldn't do this work without partners like you. So thank you so much for joining this effort. 

Now that you have more details about the CareFull Scholars Program we look forward to an open discussion with you.