By Soleil Doering ’24
Staff Writer
This year, the Mount Holyoke Posse community held its annual PossePlus Retreat virtually. The Posse Foundation “identifies, recruits and trains individuals with extraordinary leadership potential.” Posse Scholars from various chapters throughout the country receive full-tuition scholarships from Posse’s partner colleges and universities, including Mount Holyoke.
“Students are sent in teams, ‘posses,’ to work as traveling support systems for one another and make college campuses more welcoming to students of all backgrounds,” Bea Rodriguez ’24, a Posse Scholar who participated in this year’s retreat, explained.
The PossePlus Retreat originated as a way for Posse Scholars to take an active role on their campuses. As a part of PPR, Posse Scholars invite students, faculty and staff to join them in a space off-campus to conduct a dialogue about important issues facing their campuses and the world. The event is usually conducted as a weekend getaway during which all the attendants live together and participate in activities focused on that year’s theme. However, due to COVID-19 restrictions, the 2021 PPR was condensed to a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom workshop.
Program Director for Posse Miami Jessica Woolverton discussed how the interpersonal, hands-on nature of the Posse program has made transitioning to a virtual format challenging.
“There’s this larger community-building that happens at the PossePlus Retreat, which we tried to bring into the virtual world,” Woolverton said. “But it’s hard because we’re missing those small touchpoints that compound and create what the retreat is really about.”
“One of our biggest hurdles is combatting Zoom fatigue. How engaged can a person be on a Zoom call?” Woolverton said. An additional component of PPR is Posse Scholars inviting non-Posse members to join the event. But this year, PPR saw less attendance from non-Posse members.
“I didn’t feel comfortable inviting somebody else to PPR because I felt like I would have been imposing another long Zoom session on them,” Johanna Thamas ’24 said.
This year's PPR theme was “The State of Leadership: Community, Conflict, and Change.” The program drew inspiration from the recent U.S. presidential election and other societal changes and shifts that have taken place in the past year.
“Every year, we look into what is happening in our country, in our society, what could be impacting not only our scholars but the larger campus community,” Woolverton said. “We send out surveys to gauge what scholars are thinking or feeling in the moment, and that is how the theme is selected.”
Throughout the event, attendants participated in activities focused on defining leadership, such as the “human barometer.” For the human barometer, the host would make a statement or ask a question like, “Do you believe it is the duty of celebrities to use their platforms to be leaders in enacting social change?” Participants would then indicate whether they agreed with that statement by placing a stamp somewhere on a line graph on the shared Zoom screen. They were then invited to share their opinions and the reasoning behind their answers.
Raquel Andrea González Madrigal, a Mount Holyoke fellow and visiting lecturer in the department of Spanish, Latina/o and Latin American studies, was invited by one of her students to attend PPR. She reflected on the event’s activities, commenting, “I enjoyed witnessing the group come together and participate by adding stamps to the human barometer and answering polls, [with] everyone sharing their thoughts and explaining why they think the way they think.”
Olivia Ruiz ’23, another participant, said that though this year’s retreat was online, “the sense of community really came across the same way.” Ruiz added, “The spirit of discussion and motivation to engage with one another about issues that are really difficult to talk about was still there.”