ABSTRACT
The Key Communities (Key), a learning community designed to honor the diverse identities and strengths of students, are a hallmark student success initiatives program with promising graduation and persistence data for racially minoritized, low-income students and first-generation college attendees. The initial design of Key incorporated approaches, philosophies, and structures referenced in early learning community and retention literature, providing the framework of building a social community focused on academics that included frequent contact among staff, faculty, and students in and out of the classroom. This chapter describes the theories and practices of Key, which have successfully enrolled and equitably graduated students with identities that are structurally underserved by higher education, and then discusses the equity-minded frames needed to ultimately transform the institution to serve all students. It investigates individual identities and positionalities to collectively have a more strategic and effective impact for institutional change in the service of authentic access and equity.
