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ROOTS Institute logo — a stylized tree with a brown trunk, earth-toned leaves, and white roots reaching into dark soil, enclosed in a burgundy circular frameROOTS InstituteResearch · Opportunity · Organizational Navigation · Tenure & Scholarship · Sustainability

The Institute

What is the Institute — and why does it exist?

ROOTS Institute — Research, Opportunity, Organizational Navigation, Tenure & Scholarship, Sustainability — is a national, multi-year faculty development initiative. It exists to answer the question recruitment alone cannot.

Institute Overview

Recruiting Black faculty and retaining Black faculty are different challenges.

Canadian universities are investing in recruiting Black scholars. The Institute provides the developmental infrastructure that helps translate that recruitment into durable academic careers — for the scholar and for the institution.

The Institute is not a workshop series. It is a sustained partnership that develops faculty capacity while helping universities identify and strengthen the conditions in which scholars conduct research, build careers, lead, and flourish.

Recruitment Translates Into

  • Retention
  • Research Success
  • Tenure
  • Promotion
  • Leadership
  • Flourishing

Why the Institute Is Needed

“Once Black scholars are recruited, what infrastructure helps them stay, advance, secure funding, build research programs, lead people, earn tenure and promotion, and flourish?”

The question the Institute exists to answer

Canadian Context

From access to advancement.

Canadian universities and research agencies are expanding commitments to Black scholars through targeted recruitment, cohort and cluster hiring, research funding, equity-deserving group initiatives, and Canada Research Chairs equity requirements. The Institute is complementary infrastructure for those investments.

  1. Recruitment
  2. Retention
  3. Research Success
  4. Tenure
  5. Promotion
  6. Leadership
  7. Stewardship

Recruitment measures who enters the institution. The Institute helps institutions think about what happens after they arrive.

The Institute Vision

Develop the Scholar. Develop the Conditions.

The Institute is not a program for helping Black faculty simply adapt to existing systems. It develops scholars while helping institutions understand and strengthen the conditions in which scholars conduct research, build careers, lead, and flourish.

Black scholars advance when institutions evolve.

The ROOTS Glossary

Five pillars, defined for both sides of the partnership.

ROOTS — Research, Opportunity, Organizational Navigation, Tenure & Scholarship, Sustainability — names what the Institute develops. Each pillar carries a meaning for scholars and a corresponding responsibility for universities.

R

Research

The scholarship at the centre of the career.

The scholar's research enterprise — the agenda, funding, publications, partnerships, and research teams that carry an academic career from appointment through Full Professor.

For Scholars

For scholars, Research means building a coherent research agenda, competitive grant strategy, funding pipelines, publication plans, and the labs and teams that make consequential scholarship possible — not as an afterthought, but from year one.

For Universities

For universities, Research means the institution's recruitment investment matures into competitive research capacity: funded programs, productive research teams, scholarly visibility, and a research environment where Black scholars can do their best work.

O

Opportunity

Access to the moments that shape a career.

The fellowships, grants, leadership roles, collaborations, speaking invitations, and sponsorship moments through which academic careers actually advance — and which are too often distributed through informal networks.

For Scholars

For scholars, Opportunity means deliberate access: positioning for fellowships and awards, major grants, research collaborations, leadership roles, and scholarly visibility — with the mentors and sponsors who open those doors.

For Universities

For universities, Opportunity means examining how opportunities are allocated — who is mentored, sponsored, nominated, and resourced — so that access to career-shaping moments no longer depends on informal networks alone.

O

Organizational Navigation

Reading the institution. Exercising agency.

The discernment to read institutional culture, power, and politics — and the strategies to navigate them without sacrificing the scholar's research, well-being, or integrity.

For Scholars

For scholars, Organizational Navigation means learning to read the institution: power and influence, campus culture, racialized dynamics, service expectations, and difficult encounters — while protecting research time and building allies and sponsors.

For Universities

For universities, Organizational Navigation means an honest look at the environment scholars must navigate — workload, scrutiny, cultural taxation, and informal power — so the institution reduces what scholars are forced to navigate alone.

T

Tenure & Scholarship

A multi-year strategy, not a final-year scramble.

The deliberate, years-long preparation for reviews, tenure, and promotion — aligning research, teaching, service, visibility, and sponsorship into a dossier that reflects the scholar's full contribution.

For Scholars

For scholars, Tenure & Scholarship means treating the dossier as a multi-year strategy: understanding expectations early, planning annual and mid-term reviews, cultivating external referees and sponsors, and mapping the path from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor.

For Universities

For universities, Tenure & Scholarship means clarity and consistency — transparent expectations, equitable evaluation, structured mentoring, and review processes in which Black faculty are assessed on the same terms as their peers.

S

Sustainability

Flourishing as a cycle, not a moment.

The long arc: careers, networks, leadership pipelines, and institutional practices that renew themselves — so Black scholarship sustains itself across generations of scholars.

For Scholars

For scholars, Sustainability means a career that can be lived well: boundaries, belonging, purpose, emotional well-being, and the relationships and practices that make decades of scholarship — and leadership — possible.

For Universities

For universities, Sustainability means retention that endures beyond any single cohort: mentorship networks, sponsorship systems, leadership pipelines, and institutional practices that keep Black scholars thriving — and attract those who follow.

Five pillars, one ecosystem — the scholar and the institution growing together.

Shared Responsibility

One partnership, two commitments.

The Institute develops faculty capacity while helping universities improve the institutional conditions that shape faculty success.

The Scholar

The Scholarship

The Structural Conditions of the Campus Community

Explore the Scholar ExperienceExplore Institutional Partnerships

Begin the Partnership

Recruiting Black scholars is the beginning.

Let's build the conditions for them to remain, advance, lead, and flourish.

Start a ConversationExplore the Scholar Experience