APS-IDEA's Goals and Strategy for Change
Guiding principles
The mission of APS-IDEA is to empower and support physics departments, laboratories, and other organizations to identify and enact strategies for fostering environments where physicists from all backgrounds can excel. We enact this mission by establishing a community of transformation.
Our vision is that as a result of collective efforts, physics and related fields will become places where talented individuals from every background can contribute their unique perspectives, with fair distribution of opportunities and resources.
To achieve this mission and vision, APS-IDEA adheres to the guiding principles of:
- Centering people whose identities are marginalized.
- Utilizing sensemaking, including creating brave spaces.
- Implementing research-based transformational methods.
- Sharing leadership across levels, from students up to faculty.
APS-IDEA networks enacts these guiding principles by:
- Exchanging ideas, information, and experiences.
- Deepening knowledge of research and effective practices.
- Creating roadmaps for expanding participation in physics.
- Exploring approaches that remove barriers to success in physics.
- Learning about theories of change.
- Planning APS-IDEA’s programs.
- Advancing these guiding principle at your institution.
Learn about the benefits of participating in APS-IDEA
APS-IDEA teams create change
At our core, APS-IDEA seeks to empower teams of physicists at all career stages and build their capacity to transform the culture of physics within their organizations and ultimately across the entire profession, through promoting fairness and opportunity in their places of work and study. Teams are highly engaged and transform departmental culture to benefit everyone.
To support teams in successfully enacting sustainable change in their departments, APS lays out the following team characteristics and examples of APS values in action.
Understanding and enacting APS-IDEA guiding principles
When APS-IDEA team members internalize and act upon the guiding principles, they:
- Develop and use norms for shared leadership.
- Create and use practices that ensure everyone's contribution is valued.
- Regularly use sensemaking in discussions.
- Employ cognitive, cultural or political strategies to foster “second-order” change.
Being well-positioned to lead change
A team that is in a strong position to broaden participation and improve the physics environment:
- Includes department leaders and influencers.
- Has direct contact with institutional leaders.
- Has an explicit role in advising/deciding department activities
- Is visible and recognized for its work.
Being well-connected and well-resourced
Successful teams do not work in isolation and have a vast array of resources to draw from as they implement positive cultural change. To build connects and resources, a team:
- Actively engages with other APS-IDEA teams to bolster support.
- Stays in contact with relevant experts at their institution and beyond.
- Explicitly values efforts to build supportive physics communities in department policies and practices.
- Supports their members' participation through making department funding available for such work.
About APS-IDEA
The APS-IDEA initiative, funded by the APS Innovation Fund in 2019, was created to advance community-wide efforts to make physics a place for alI. Working in tandem with other APS initiatives, APS-IDEA provides a flexible platform that physics organizations can use to engage with other efforts or develop their own independent efforts to address their own unique challenges. By fostering transformational change within physics departments, APS-IDEA is building pathways for talented individuals from all backgrounds to uplift science as a whole.
Learn more about APS-IDEA