Jennifer Hudson, assistant ombudsperson and director of the Student Conflict Resolution Center at the University of Oregon, has been invited to join the Forward50 Committee to work on policy recommendations destined for Capitol Hill.

The 50 postsecondary education representatives that make up the Forward50 Higher Education Committee are broken up into four subgroups: accessibility, affordability, accountability and transparency.

Each group focuses on drafting policy changes that relate to its category. Hudson’s work places her in the accessibility group with seven other colleagues from institutions across the country.

The accessibility group focuses on topics that include improving the first-year experience for students, reducing or removing structural barriers, improving access to information and assessing student retention.

“I think it’s a really exciting moment to not only change the dialogue regionally but nationally around these issues for students,” Hudson said. “We want to diversify campuses, we want student retention, we want student success; we need to start thinking about these things not only as it pertains to our institutions but at large.

Hudson’s work on the Forward50 committee is a yearlong position that involves meeting with the entire committee twice a year in Washington, D.C. These meetings usually last two to three days and involve full days of collaboration and conversation.

In addition to the full committee meetings twice a year, Hudson also meets with members of the accessibility committee online bimonthly.

“With our busy schedules it’s thrilling to be a part of something that people care that much about to carve time out of their lives for,” Hudson said. “To meet as much as we do for as long as we do I think you would have to be impassioned by it.”

The accessibility group alone has drafted 10 policy recommendations since March 2018. These recommendations went to the public from Sept. 4-28 for constructive criticism. After editing and reworking the recommendations, the policy changes will be officially released on Capitol Hill in March 2019.

This is the first full year that the Froward50 committee has operated. A grant to form the Forward50 committee came to the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators in late 2017 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Members of the Higher Education Committee of 50 are engaged, committed and passionate individuals,” the Forward50 website says. “Altogether they hold memberships with more than 140 other higher education-related professional associations, with many serving in multiple leadership roles.”

A big focus of the accessibility group is access to information. Policy changes will seek to improve access to information about education as well as reducing structural barriers to higher education itself.

“It’s really exciting for the UO to be a part of this opportunity,” Hudson said. “It’s a change-making initiative that has large potential to shift the direction of national dialogue around the impact of issues that confront our students in higher education.”

To learn more about the Froward50 committee, see its website.

­—By Bryan Dorn, University Communications