Our Faces, Our Voices, Part Three: Designing Belonging

When I started Bridging Legacies Across Campuses (BLAC), I was interested in stories.

I wanted to understand how people experienced schools, organizations, and communities. I wanted to hear about moments of opportunity, challenge, belonging, uncertainty, and growth. At the time, I was not thinking about frameworks, models, or institutional design. I was simply curious about people's journeys and what those journeys might teach us.

As the conversations accumulated, however, something unexpected began to happen.

While every story was unique, many of the themes were remarkably consistent. People described moments when they felt seen and moments when they felt invisible. They reflected on communities that helped them thrive and environments that left them questioning whether they belonged. They spoke about teachers, mentors, advisors, coaches, colleagues, and friends who helped them navigate important transitions. They described opportunities that opened doors and barriers that made progress more difficult.

At first, my attention was focused almost entirely on the people themselves. I found myself drawn to their resilience, their insight, and their ability to navigate complex environments. Every conversation offered a new perspective and another reminder that no educational or professional journey is ever as straightforward as it appears from the outside.

Over time, however, something shifted.

The more stories I collected, the less interested I became in isolated moments of individual success and the more interested I became in the environments surrounding those experiences. I began to realize that every conversation revealed something about an individual's journey, but it also revealed something about the school, organization, or community that shaped that journey.

The stories were helping me understand people.

They were also helping me understand institutions.

Looking back, I realize I started BLAC believing I was collecting stories about people. Today, I believe I was also collecting stories about environments. Every interview revealed something about an individual's experience, but it also revealed something about the systems, relationships, and structures surrounding that experience.

That realization sits at the center of this trilogy.

In Part One, Where Belonging Begins, the focus was on listening. Before analysis, before patterns, and before conclusions, there had to be a willingness to hear people in their own words. The conversations reminded me that belonging is deeply personal. It is shaped by identity, relationships, opportunity, and community. More than anything, Part One reinforced a simple truth: people want to feel seen, heard, and valued.

In Part Two, Turning Voice into Vision, the work moved from listening to learning. As interviews accumulated, patterns began to emerge. Individual experiences revealed broader themes connected to visibility, mentorship, belonging, access, and legacy. The Narrative Intelligence Model grew from this process, not as a way to reduce stories to data points, but as a way to better understand what those stories might teach us.

Part Three begins with a different question.

What should institutions do once they understand what people are experiencing?

Listening creates awareness. Reflection creates understanding. Insight creates possibility. Yet none of those things automatically create change. At some point, institutions must decide whether what they have learned will influence what they build.

That decision is where design begins.

Across more than forty recorded interviews and countless informal conversations, BLAC began noticing that belonging rarely emerged because of a single program, initiative, or statement. Instead, it appeared through a combination of visibility, relationships, and structure. While the stories were different, similar patterns continued to emerge regardless of institution, profession, geography, or pathway.

One of the first patterns I noticed involved visibility. Participants frequently described the difference between being present in a community and feeling genuinely recognized by it. The stories rarely focused on representation alone. More often, they focused on recognition. People wanted to know that their experiences mattered, that their perspectives were valued, and that they were seen as contributors to the communities around them.

One participant captured this distinction in a way I have never forgotten:

"I didn't need someone who looked like me; I needed someone who saw me."

The more I reflected on that statement, the more I realized it was describing an environmental condition rather than an individual one. What struck me was how often participants described visibility not as representation alone, but as recognition. Research from the University of Washington Libraries reinforces this observation, but long before I encountered the research, I had already begun hearing the pattern emerge through BLAC conversations.

A second pattern involved relationships. Across interviews, people repeatedly remembered the individuals who helped them navigate uncertainty, build confidence, and understand unfamiliar environments. Sometimes it was a teacher. Sometimes it was a mentor, coach, advisor, colleague, or friend. The titles changed and the stories changed, but the pattern remained.

People thrive when they know someone is invested in their success.

These relationships often became bridges between uncertainty and understanding, helping people move through experiences that might have otherwise felt overwhelming. Research from the University of Michigan's National Center for Institutional Diversity reinforces this observation, highlighting the importance of mentorship and relational accountability in creating environments where people can thrive.

The third pattern involved structure. This may have been the most surprising observation of all. Participants were not simply describing interactions with people. They were also describing interactions with systems. They talked about communication practices, institutional expectations, traditions, opportunities, barriers, and policies. They described moments when systems supported their growth and moments when systems created unnecessary friction.

These stories reinforced an important lesson: institutions are constantly communicating through the structures they create. Every policy, process, expectation, and practice sends a message about who belongs, who is supported, and whose experiences matter. Research from the National Association of Independent Schools similarly notes that institutions often succeed in delivering academic rigor while continuing to wrestle with questions of cultural fluency, inclusion, and belonging.

As these patterns continued to emerge, I began to understand something that had not been obvious when BLAC first began.

The stories were not simply describing people.

They were describing environments.

When someone shares their lived experience, they are also describing the system they are moving through. They are revealing where support exists, where barriers remain, where trust is present, and where belonging feels fragile. They are providing insight into how an institution is experienced by the people it serves.

Every story contains two narratives.

The first is the individual's experience.

The second is the institution's response to that experience.

Most organizations spend significant time studying outcomes. Far fewer spend time studying how people experienced the environment that produced those outcomes. Yet those experiences often contain some of the most valuable information available to leaders seeking to strengthen their communities.

That realization changed how I understood the work.

What organizations choose to measure often shapes what they choose to improve. Yet many of the experiences that influence belonging, trust, mentorship, navigation, and opportunity are difficult to capture through traditional metrics alone. Stories provide a different kind of information. They help us understand not only what is happening, but how people are experiencing what is happening.

In that sense, stories are more than narratives.

They are a form of institutional feedback.

Traditional metrics can tell us what is happening. Stories often help us understand why it is happening and how it is experienced. Enrollment figures, retention rates, survey data, and demographic reports provide valuable information, but lived experience provides context. Stories reveal dimensions of institutional life that are difficult to quantify yet impossible to ignore once they are heard.

When we listen carefully enough, stories become diagnostic tools that help us understand environments in ways traditional data often cannot.

The work of BLAC is no longer simply about documenting journeys. It is about understanding what those journeys reveal about the environments people move through. Every conversation offers an opportunity to learn something about how schools, organizations, and communities function. Every story provides insight into how those environments can become more responsive, supportive, and effective over time.

Looking back, the progression feels clear.

In Part One, we listened.

In Part Two, we learned.

In Part Three, we considered what institutions might do with what they have learned.

The stories collected through BLAC began as conversations. Over time, they became patterns. Increasingly, they have become something else: a way of understanding how people experience the environments around them.

Every story tells us something about a person.

Every collection of stories tells us something about an institution.

That realization continues to shape the direction of BLAC. The work is no longer simply about documenting experiences. It is about learning from them. It is about understanding how people navigate schools, organizations, and communities, and what those journeys reveal about the environments they move through. Ultimately, it is about helping institutions listen more carefully, learn more intentionally, and build more thoughtfully.

Reader Reflection

Where do you see yourself in this conversation?

What stories have shaped your understanding of belonging, community, and opportunity?

What might those stories reveal about the environments in which they occurred?

And what responsibility do we have once we understand what those experiences are teaching us?

Call to Action

Listen deeply.

Learn intentionally.

Build thoughtfully.

BLAC continues to explore how lived experience can inform institutional learning, helping schools, organizations, and communities better understand the environments they create and the people they serve.

→ Explore the Our Faces, Our Voices series

→ Learn more about BLAC's Narrative Intelligence Model

→ Partner with BLAC to translate stories into institutional learning

Works Cited

Bergeron, J., et al. Independent School Leadership and Cultural Norms: Equity and Resistance. Vanderbilt University, 2023.

College Rover. “BIPOC Student Experience: Barriers and Belonging.” College Rover Campus Library, 2024.

McMurtrie, Beth. “13 Ways to Improve Higher Ed for BIPOC Students.” Inside Higher Ed, 2024.

National Association of Independent Schools. Educational Equity in Independent Schools: Summary of Findings. NAIS, 2023.

National Center for Institutional Diversity. Thriving Staff of Color: Building Culture through Cascade Mentorship. University of Michigan, 2024.

Penn State Center for Educational Equity. “Moving from Access to Belonging.” Penn State University Research Brief, 2024.

Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. “The Design of Belonging.” Stanford Report, 2024.

University of Washington Libraries. “Showcasing BIPOC Graduate Student Work.” UW Libraries Strategic Communications Blog, 2024.