The Harold Promise

Welcome Message from President López

To the Harold Washington College community – our students, alumni, faculty and staff, family, and friends:

I am pleased to share here our Harold Promise plan, the culmination of many months of work internally and with our Achieving the Dream partners.

Harold Washington College is a proud community college, and the Harold Promise plan articulates our college-wide strategic and operational priorities to shape equitable outcomes for all our students. Below, I have shared some context around our college, the Harold Promise plan, and our implementation structure.

My deepest gratitude goes out to our Achieving the Dream coaches, Laurie Heacock and Chris Calienes, who helped us shape much of our plan and implementation structure. I am also endlessly grateful to our HWC faculty and staff for their adoption of the Harold Promise. Their push to be the best-in-class in the service of our students is motivating and humbling. Lastly, I would like to thank our CCC district, college partners, and broader Chicago familia for championing our important Harold Promise work at every level, from the classroom to throughout the city. Our work represents that of a full community, and I look forward to our continued collaboration to uplift all of our students.

Sincerely,

Daniel López, Ph.D.
President

Introduction to Harold Washington College

Harold Washington College (HWC), one of the City Colleges of Chicago, is an independently accredited institution located in downtown Chicago. Originally founded in 1962 as Loop College, it was later renamed in honor of Chicago’s first African American mayor. The spirit of our former mayor is embedded in our college’s purpose: in his honor, we aim to uplift the Chicago community through accessible and affordable academic advancement, career development, and personal enrichment.

Our pride is in our central and accessible location in the Loop, which permits students from all parts of the city to come to us; our deeply dedicated faculty and staff, who represent and advocate for our students; and our academic and student service excellence, which enables us to provide our students with appropriate and culturally sensitive resources.

We are a Hispanic-Serving and Minority-Serving Institution, with deep values of diversity, academic excellence, and global citizenship. Serving over 9,000 students annually, approximately 87% of our students identify as people of color, with over 75% of students identifying as Latine or African American. The median student age is 21, and approximately half of our students come from Chicago Public Schools. Nearly 48% of students are Pell-eligible

Background on the Harold Promise Plan: Our Work with Achieving the Dream

In 2024, Harold Washington College joined the Achieving the Dream Achieving Equitable Outcomes Cohort. As a part of this cohort, we undertook a planning process, with the ultimate purpose of aligning college initiatives with our Universal Outcomes Goal. Our Universal Outcomes Goal states that by 2032, 55% of our students, across all racial and ethnic groups, will either complete their credential or transfer to a Bachelor’s granting institution within four years of starting college. During the planning process, we identified, assessed, and evaluated various portions of our overall student experience, academic programming, and operational health. A team of HWC faculty and staff members undertook the process of understanding and interpreting various student voice data. Data assessed included rates of HWC student general credit completion, English and Math completion, and academic plan selection. In addition, the team reviewed HWC’s 2024 Hope Survey, which assessed levels of students’ basic needs, and the 2022 Net Promoter Score (NPS), which assessed student satisfaction with their experience at HWC and offered an opportunity to suggest improvements.

As a result of this effort, HWC created a “Harold Promise” plan detailing the actions needed to achieve the Universal Outcomes Goal. The Harold Promise is a one-stop shop for all our cross-college strategic and operational initiatives. The Harold Promise plan integrates our work with Achieving the Dream, our State of Illinois Equity Plan and strategic plan to provide a clear, actionable set of next steps to achieve our goals.

We recognize that any student success cannot, and should not, happen in any one area of our college. We understand that each portion of our college contributes uniquely to the student experience, as is demonstrated in the graphic below:

As a result, any initiative coming through our Harold Promise plan will necessarily involve cross-college collaboration, and this is reflected in our Harold Promise implementation infrastructure. All teams within the Harold Promise structure will include voices from faculty and staff from different parts of our college.

The Harold Promise promotes a shared vision of success: that of continuous improvement and a sharp focus on the values that matter most to us: excellence, support, and social justice.

Our Framework

The Student Journey

The College Journey

The Harold Promise Plan

The following graphic represents the teams and decision-making structure within the Harold Promise implementation structure.

Core Teams (the President’s Cabinet, the Core Strategy Group, the Data Analysis Team, and the Listen and Learn Team) will be standing committees, while the Project Teams will run for one to two years.

Core Teams are generally tasked with providing guidance and support to the Project teams, while focusing on ongoing continuous improvement of the Harold Promise plan. Project Teams are generally tasked with leading the charge on one specific strategy within the Harold Promise plan. Additional Project Teams will be launched in the coming years.