By Chris Butcher, Ed.D., Coordinator, Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning, Eastern Kentucky University
During the Fall 2025 semester, I facilitated a book club at Eastern Kentucky University around Kevin McClure’s The Caring University. Twelve or so faculty and staff read the book together and met three times to discuss the book and envision applications to EKU. Dr. McClure joined us virtually for our final session for a Q&A, which was both generous and enjoyable.
Book clubs are a reliable professional development. They are also easy to end. We read, we talk, the book ends, meetings end. I’d like to share what happened after our meetings didn’t end.
What we hoped to do
As the second meeting began, our book group was eager to talk. We used whiteboards to identify a barrier participants had encountered, then an individual fix (a work-around) they’d invented for themselves, then a guardrail that could solve it for everyone. The conversation dwindled around the third column. It wasn’t because the group lacked ideas, but because a book club wasn’t positioned to install a guardrail.
In December, as the book study wound down, one participant, Dr. Gill Hunter, and I drafted a charge for a group structure beyond a book study. Our goal was to identify, pilot, and scale tangible actions that help faculty and staff feel seen, heard, and valued. This was not a campus climate survey, not a strategic plan. Instead, our goal was to identify simple actions that could be tried in one area of the university, translated into others and, in ways small or large, transform the faculty and staff experience.
How we built the group
We first invited participants who could contribute to the charge. We asked what parts of the institution would need to be in the room for change to occur. Then, we reached out directly: Staff Council, Faculty Senate, Faculty Welfare Committee, a part-time faculty representative, Human Resources, Facilities, Campus Recreation, the Library, our regional campuses, Enrollment Management, our academic colleges, and the President’s Office. This intentionality increased the likelihood that initiatives could be identified, that there would be support for trying new things, and that those with promise could be adapted to other areas of the university.
We also prioritized a tight structure, scheduling three meetings spread across the semester so the focus would remain on implementing rather than generating ideas – doing rather than talking.
What we did
Our January meeting, abruptly shifted online after a surprise Kentucky snowfall, was almost entirely definitional. The group began by defining care, joy, and engagement, then we asked what they believed EKU employees actually need. The meeting got interesting when we asked participants to identify the “pebbles in employees’ shoes,” because we acknowledged that care can be shown, and change can occur, both by introducing a positive stimulus and by removing a negative condition. This combination created a mindset among participants that endured.
Following the introductory meeting, each participant hosted a listening session in their area of the university and brought notes to the March meeting. They were looking for practices already in place that promote care, joy, and engagement, and promising practices worth piloting. Thirteen people running small listening sessions across a decentralized campus produced an abundance of actionable information. It also distributed authorship of the findings, which matters when you later ask those same people to join in implementation.
We circulated the notes we collected, attributing every comment so participants could continue the conversation on their own without routing through us, so that our role could be reduced to thought partner and encourager.
Participants found ideas worth scaling everywhere. One department reported hanging a physical gold star each week outside a “star” staff or faculty member’s office with a note attached. Now multiple areas of campus share stars. Another area reported hosting lunches. Another said they do birthday cards. Other areas found ways to break bread together and to acknowledge milestone moments. None of it cost much, if anything. But it mattered.
What we learned
- Inventory before you invent. Our most useful outcome was nothing new: a catalog of existing practices, sorted into “unique to this context” and “could be scaled.”
- Put the work between the meetings. The meetings were for deciding. The listening sessions and surveys of the environment were for learning.
- Name what a workgroup can’t fix. Our “pebbles in the shoe” list included big topics, wicked problems not unique to EKU, like compensation, the pressure to do more with less, breakdowns in communication, and scarcity of resources that creates competition between divisions. A grassroots workgroup cannot solve those. McClure’s own argument is that appreciation becomes hollow when it substitutes for structural change, so we said out loud, early, that we were not offering a gold star in place of a raise. That candor probably helped group members keep showing up.
- Concentrate rather than proliferate. Twelve scattered initiatives would have found no footing. Group meetings might have been filled with big ideas, but nothing would have been moved forward, nothing would have been done.
Where it’s going
As the spring semester ended and the fall semester began, we invited group members to apply our lessons learned to a faculty and staff appreciation week (November 9–13), surrounding our established and popular Thank-a-Professor program, where students submit gratitude notes to faculty for several weeks ahead of a November recognition event. Thank-a-Professor is beloved, but its audience is limited, and generally does not include the essential university employees who foster a culture of care and joy without ever stepping foot in the classroom. Our appreciation week ideas are not flashy or expensive, but they are meaningful, even impactful. Colleagues will notice, they’ll know someone cares, and their connection to the place and the people around them will grow stronger.
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