Long-term Planning / Center Leadership Development

The first stage of succession planning is long-term.  UCEDD Directors are encouraged to invest in professional development for promising leaders within their centers on an ongoing basis.  We have addressed Professional Development on a separate resource page here. 

Activities

• The AUCD Leadership Academy is a year-long program designed to enhance the skills of current and emerging leaders from the disability network in building coalitions that will improve systems of supports and services. The year of activities includes a week-long intensive in-person retreat in Atlanta. 

Active Planning and Implementation of Transition

Resources

• UCEDD Leadership: A Guide to the Next Generation: This guide, created by a workgroup of network members, introduces the DD Act and related regulations, expectations of OIDD, and recommendations from the network to assist search committees in finding new UCEDD Directors. Technical assistance to UCEDD Director Search Committees is also available; university administration and/or the search committee chair are encouraged to contact Dawn Rudolph at [email protected].
• Sample succession planning policy and procedures, provided by the Westchester Institute on Human Development in New York. 
• The Perceptions of Past and Current UCEDD Directors on Transitioning in and out of the Role of UCEDD Director: Developed by Dr. Fred Orelove, former director of the VA UCEDD, this report summarizes the findings of a series of interviews of UCEDD Directors who have retired or left their program in the past five years and of directors who have stepped into those positions in that same period.
• Roles and Experiences of Senior Staff in UCEDD Director Transitions: This report presents findings from interviews with UCEDD senior staff members who recently experienced a director transition. 
• Request for Director Changes: OIDD requires that a change in principle investigator/director on the core grant receive their prior approval. 
• Information Available Upon Request: For the documents below, please email the URC.
  • Job Descriptions of UCEDD Directors and Associate Directors
  • Results of National Salary Survey of UCEDD Directors and Associate Directors(Available to UCEDD Directors and University Administrators only)

Webinars

• UCEDD Director Transitions: This webinar introduced two technical assistance documents related to UCEDD Director transitions -a guide for university search committees called UCEDD Leadership: A Guide to the Next Generation and a report on the roles and experiences of senior staff in UCEDD Director Transitions. The webinar also provided insight from Don Tebbe,Executive Vice President of Transition Guides, on the importance of planning for director transitions.
• The Perceptions of Past and Current UCEDD Directors on Transitioning in and out of the Role of UCEDD Director: Several UCEDDs across the country have recently experienced transitions of new leadership, as directors retire or pursue new professional opportunities. Transitions in general can by stressful, but transitions of directors, especially individuals who have held the position for a long period, can present particular challenges to a program. This webinar presented findings from a series of interviews of UCEDD Directors who have retired or left their program in the past five years and of Directors who have stepped into those positions in that same period.
• Orientation for Charting Your Course: A Toolkit for New UCEDD Directors: Join Matthew Wesley Williams, Author of AUCD's Charting Your Course: A Toolkit for New Directors of University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD) for a walkthrough and Q & A of this robust resource. Williams will model and contextualize each section and its modules for the current educational landscape. 

Support for New Directors

Welcome to your new role.  In addition to reviewing many of the resources listed above, several items of particular value to new directors include:

Activities

• New directors can expect a one-on-one phone conversation with URC TA staff. If you have not been contacted, feel free to reach out to the URC at [email protected].  
• You will be added to the UCEDD Directors Listserv ([email protected]).  Through this mechanism, you will receive all the AUCD newsletters  and communications intended for UCEDD directors. 
• New directors are also invited to attend a New Directors Orientation within your first year.  During this 2 day in person event at the AUCD offices in Silver Spring, you will receive many of the above materials and talk through the transition timeline with an experienced director as a mentor and a cohort of peers. Each cohort meets quarterly for the year following their orientation to share successes, challenges, and problem-solving. For information on our next new director orientation contact Rebekka Willis at [email protected].

Resources

• Charting Your Course: A Toolkit for New Directors of University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDDs): This toolkit contains a series of concepts and exercises designed to help early stage UCEDD directors begin well in their roles. To complement the regulatory and technical resources above, this toolkit is designed to provide concepts, frameworks and tools that build that capacity of UCEDD directors for organizational and systems leadership. To view in booklet format, download and open in Adobe Acrobat or other PDF software.