Institutional mentoring to incite a revolution through NSF's RED program

A recent initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF), IUSE/PFE: REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED), is serving as a catalyst to encourage widespread, revolutionary, and radical change in engineering and computer science departments across the nation. After two years and 13 RED awards being funded, there is little diversity in the types of institutions-one is private, two are undergraduate-focused, and two are Hispanicserving institutions. To address this lack of institutional diversity in funded RED projects, previous awardees of the program utilized a framework developed by the team, termed institutional mentoring, to develop a series of webinars aimed at helping diverse institutions envision a revolutionary idea for radically changing their program, assembling a team capable of realizing this vision, and using change strategies to help increase the likelihood of success and lasting change. This team deliberately reached out to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and minority-serving institutions in an attempt to make more diverse institutions aware of this opportunity, with the hopes of increasing submissions of proposals to the RED program and the quality and likelihood of success for these proposals. In this paper, we describe the institutional mentoring framework, the process used in developing the seminars, and a synopsis of the sessions that made up the webinar.