Part III of the series “Still, We Rise: Translating Research, Practice, and Purpose in Student Affairs”
About This Series: This is Part III of a three-part series grounded in dissertation research on Black undergraduate women at historically White institutions. Part I established the study’s methodological framing and key themes. Part II detailed how those findings were translated into practice through the development of Sista Circles at the University of Georgia, tracing the partnerships, design decisions, and lived outcomes that shaped the initiative. Part III turns to implications for leadership and institutional responsibility, centering sustainability as both an ethical commitment and a practice-based calling.
What Sustainability Actually Looks Like
When I learned that the students in NCNW were keeping Sista Circles going after I transitioned out of my role, it meant everything to me. That is not a figure of speech. It is the truest measure of what the work was always meant to be: something that took root deeply enough to grow without me at the center of it. I had taken my research from theory to practice, and what emerged was something the students claimed as their own. That is a real source of pride, and it is the lens through which everything in this final piece is written.
Parts I and II of this series traced a movement from listening to building. Part I centered the narratives of Black undergraduate women who named hypervisibility, racial battle fatigue, and the sustaining power of community as defining features of their undergraduate experience at historically White institutions (Corbin et al., 2018; Kelly et al., 2021; Smith, 2004; Winkle-Wagner, 2015). Part II described what happened when those narratives were taken seriously as design knowledge, tracing how Sista Circles came into being through partnership, trust, and a commitment to building with students rather than for them. This final piece asks what comes after the building: what does it mean to lead in a way that makes identity-affirming work outlast the practitioner who initiated it, and what does that kind of leadership require of us?
These are not abstract questions. They are the questions I lived, and the answers I found are the ones I want to share here.
Programs depend on the people who run them. Cultures carry themselves. What Sista Circles became, under the stewardship of students who had been trusted from the start, was not a program anymore. It was a practice. And that distinction, between something institutional and something living, is at the heart of what sustainability means in identity-centered work.
Leadership Beyond Position
Sustaining work like Sista Circles requires a kind of leadership that lives in relationship rather than position. It is values-driven, built on trust, and oriented toward the growth and well-being of the students it serves. That orientation does not diminish institutional responsibility. It deepens it.
It aligns with what ACPA/NASPA professional competencies ask of us under Leadership: the capacity to influence institutional culture, advocate ethically, and engage in collaborative practice that moves beyond individual authority (American College Personnel Association & National Association of Student Personnel Administrators [ACPA & NASPA], 2015). What that looked like in practice, for me, was translation work. When questions arose about the programs scope or purpose, I did not retreat from the work’s identity-centered foundation. I connected it to outcomes that the institution already understood and valued: belonging as a driver of persistence (Strayhorn, 2018), community as a buffer against racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004), and culturally sustaining spaces as conditions for full academic engagement (Paris, 2012). The values did not change. The vocabulary expanded. That kind of bridge-building is not compromise. It is strategy, and it is one that equity-minded practitioners develop over time through the work itself.
The most durable thing I did in sustaining Sista Circles was not design a curriculum or write a proposal. It was investing in relationships with students, with NCNW, with colleagues who believed in the work, so that the initiative was held by a network of people rather than a single set of hands. When I left, those hands were still there. Relational leadership does not produce dependence. It produces capacity. The continuation of Sista Circles after my departure was proof of that.
Building for Continuity
I did not use the word sustainability when I first started building Sista Circles. I was thinking about trust, about partnership, about what it would mean to enter a design process without a predetermined outcome and let students shape what emerged. Looking back, that is exactly what sustainability required.
The partnership with NCNW was not logistical. It was foundational. Asking students what had been missing, and allowing their answers to reshape the plan before a single flyer was designed or a date was set, meant that the program reflected the people it was meant to serve before it ever held its first session. Students were not recipients of something built for them. They were co-architects of something they helped create, and that investment is what made the work transferable when I was no longer there to carry it.
There is something Black feminist thought has always understood about this: that when knowledge is held collectively, it does not disappear when one person leaves the room (Collins, 2000). That principle was not just theoretical in Sista Circles. It was structural. It was the reason NCNW members could keep the work moving, evolve it according to their own priorities, and bring new students into something that already had roots.
Sustainability also requires honest attention to the conditions under which equity work happens. Identity-centered programs should not depend on the extraordinary commitment of a single person, running on passion and personal investment without dedicated support. When the infrastructure behind a program is as intentional as the program itself, the work has a far better chance of outlasting the individuals who initiated it. Advocating for those conditions is not separate from the work. It is part of leading it well.
Mentorship as a Sustainability Strategy
If there is one decision I made in building Sista Circles that most directly shaped its survival, it was treating students as leaders from the beginning rather than beneficiaries of a space someone else designed and maintained.
This came directly from what the research had already taught me. Participants in Part I described community as foundational to their persistence, not supplemental to it (Strayhorn, 2018). They named spaces grounded in shared identity and collective care as essential to their ability to show up, persist, and make meaning of their experiences. That understanding shaped every design decision in Sista Circles, and what I did not fully appreciate until I transitioned out was how thoroughly that investment in student ownership would determine the program’s future.
Mentorship within Sista Circles was never hierarchical. It was reciprocal. Students supported one another’s growth while facilitators modeled reflective practice. Knowledge moved in multiple directions. That is consistent with how Black feminist traditions understand community: leadership as distributed, care as central, and the wisdom held in lived experience as genuinely authoritative (Collins, 2000; Dillard, 2008). Students in NCNW were not volunteers executing a staff-driven vision. They were co-stewards of something they had helped create, and they brought that ownership forward when the institutional structure shifted around them.
When Sista Circles continued without me, it was not despite my departure. In an important sense, it continued because of how the work had been built. That is the goal: not programs that require us, but communities that sustain themselves. The work we do in equity-centered spaces is not ours to keep. It belongs to the communities it serves, and our deepest contribution is creating the conditions for those communities to lead.
Attending to Leader Well-Being and Purpose
There is something I want to name directly, because I think practitioner literature sometimes softens it: this work is demanding in ways that are specific to equity-centered practice. The emotional labor is real, cumulative, and it does not disappear when you close your office door.
There were moments in the development and sustainment of Sista Circles when I was holding multiple things at once: supporting students through difficult experiences, managing programmatic demands, navigating institutional conversations, and doing my own ongoing reflection as a scholar-practitioner. What sustained me through that was not any single strategy. It was a combination of purpose, community, and the discipline of returning to the research.
Going back to the participant narratives, sitting with the findings, asking what the data still required of me, was not just an intellectual exercise. It was renewal. It reconnected me to why the work existed in the first place and reminded me what was actually at stake. For scholar-practitioners, inquiry and leadership are not separate endeavors. The research does not end when the program begins. It continues as a resource for reflection, grounding, and purpose.
Community sustained me in ways I did not always have words for in the moment. The colleagues who understood this work without needing it explained, who could sit with the complexity of it without simplifying or minimizing: that network was not supplemental to my capacity to lead. It was foundational to it. We talk about building community for students. We have to be equally intentional about building it for ourselves.
Setting limits and protecting space for reflection are not failures of commitment. They are conditions of sustainability. The students we serve deserve practitioners who are present and grounded, and that requires us to tend to our own well-being with the same seriousness we bring to theirs.
Sustaining Cultures, Not Just Programs
Ultimately, sustainability is not about preserving a single initiative. It is about cultivating the kind of institutional culture where students’ lived experiences are recognized as legitimate sources of knowledge, and where the spaces built in response to those experiences are treated as essential rather than supplemental.
The measure of Sista Circles was never whether it continued in the form I designed. It was whether those young women had something that held them. Something that let them be fully themselves without explanation or performance. Something they did not have to earn or justify. That is what they built together. That is what they kept.
Part I documented what participants were missing: spaces where they did not have to explain themselves, where their intersecting identities were not accommodated as exceptions but centered as the starting point (Collins, 2000; Dillard, 2008; Crenshaw, 1991). Part II described what it looked like to build that kind of space with intention and in genuine partnership with students. This final piece has tried to ask what it looks like to lead in a way that makes such spaces outlast us, and to sit honestly with the answer: it requires us to build with communities, not just for them.
Across this three-part series, a throughline has emerged. When institutions listen to students, respond with intention, and lead with purpose, equity work becomes embedded rather than symbolic. That embedding does not happen by accident. It happens through relationship, through reciprocal mentorship, through advocacy for the structures that make this work survivable, and through practitioners who stay connected to their own purpose even when the work is hard.
The title of this series is Still, We Rise. I chose that framing deliberately, because rising is not a singular event. It is a practice, repeated across circumstances, carried by communities, sustained through relationship and intention. The students who built Sista Circles alongside me are still rising. The students who find that space now, without knowing my name or my role in its origins, are rising in it. That is not a footnote to the work. That is the work.
What we owe students is not programs that depend on our presence. It is cultures that hold them in our absence. When we lead, mentor, advocate, and reflect with that goal in mind, we do more than create initiatives. We create conditions. And conditions, unlike programs, can outlast us all.
Practice Takeaways
- Sustainability begins at the design stage. When students are co-architects from the start, they develop a stake in the work that outlasts any single staff transition.
- Relational leadership builds capacity, not dependence. Invest in the network of people who believe in the work, and it will be held by more than one set of hands.
- Advocate for the infrastructure that makes equity work survivable: dedicated staffing, protected time, and institutional structures that treat this work as essential.
- Mentorship across roles, practiced with reciprocity and generosity, is one of the most powerful sustainability strategies available to us.
- Stay connected to your own purpose. Returning to the research, to community, and to the students’ stories is not a luxury. It is what keeps the work grounded and the practitioner whole.
Reflection Questions: Part III
- How do your leadership practices create conditions for identity-affirming work to endure beyond your own presence in a role?
- In what ways are you mentoring emerging professionals and students to center equity as a leadership responsibility, not just a personal value?
- How do you care for yourself and your team in ways that model sustainability rather than normalize sacrifice?
- Where in your institution is identity-centered work being sustained by individual commitment alone, and what would it take to change that?
Author Biography
Wanda Johnson (She/Her) is an award-winning scholar-practitioner whose research and practice center the lived experiences of Black women at historically White institutions. Grounded in Black feminist thought and critical narrative inquiry, her work explores belonging, identity, and institutional transformation while advancing culturally responsive support initiatives for Black women in higher education.
References
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