Laura Borgman and the Art of Problem Solving
Spotlight: Spring 2026 Classified Staff Excellence Award recipient
Sometimes, the best solution to a problem is finding the right person to help. The challenge might be figuring out why a form isn't working. Maybe it's about keeping an important process moving forward. Or perhaps, it's looking at the way things have always been done and asking whether there might be a better way.
Enter Laura Borgman.
“What’s the problem?” she asks. “I’m going to fix it.”
It’s a simple philosophy, but for Laura, problem-solving rarely means putting a Band-Aid on something that isn’t working. She understands the problem, finds the right people to help solve it, and then builds a system that prevents the same problem from happening again.
That mindset has served her well since she joined Clark in 2022 as office manager for the Transitional Studies Division. At the time, the BEECH unit struggled with siloed divisions, so Laura and her four-person team created a more cohesive support system.
The approach worked, but not just because of the systems Laura helped build. The people building them worked well together, too.
“Because we work so efficiently together, it makes it easier for us to take on extra or bigger, more abstract projects,” Laura said.
She values the different perspectives her colleagues bring to a project. More perspectives mean more opportunities to find a creative solution or a more efficient way of doing something. Her colleagues see that collaborative spirit, describing Laura as a true team player who helps lighten the load for others.
“Laura has the type of personality that makes work less stressful,” one nominator said.
Laura came to higher education after working as a high school substitute English teacher, making it a natural transition to Clark. Her work touches nearly every part of the BEECH unit’s operations.
Among her many projects, Laura handles purchasing and travel requests, coordinates professional development, and assists with evaluations and the faculty tenure process. She also serves as the department’s records retention coordinator, continually monitoring policies and retention dates and developing processes for maintaining and disposing of documents and records.
In other words, Laura spends a lot of time figuring out how things work, and how they could work better.
Her problem-solving skills are evident in one of the projects she’s most proud of: the Exceptional Faculty Awards program.
Laura is the lead support person for the awards, working with departments across the college, as well as the six members of the Faculty of Excellence Award Committee. And when the committee suddenly lost a chair, she stepped up and kept the program on track. Laura took initiative to keep the process moving forward, coordinating across multiple departments to ensure the awards program continued uninterrupted.
Over four years, she has helped the program continue to evolve. The team streamlined the rubric to focus more directly on equity and revised the language to be more student-focused. Laura reads through the nominations and disaggregates the information so the committee can make informed, data-driven decisions. She also helps the committee identify factors and anomalies in the data so that marginalized groups receive appropriate consideration.
It’s another example of Laura’s dedication to fixing the system, not just the problem. By building equity directly into the way nominations are reviewed and scored, Laura made the awards process more inclusive from the inside out.
She has brought her creative problem-solving mindset to other diversity, equity, and inclusion issues at Clark. She assists faculty and staff in creating equitable opportunities for English as a Second Language (ESL) and College and Academic Preparation (CAP) students, helping ensure they have access to the resources they need, and actively supports instructors who teach Basic Education for Adults (BEdA) students.
Problem-solving comes in many forms. Sometimes, it means knowing who to call for help.
And Laura tends to know exactly who that person is, because making connections is part of her skill set. Her favorite times of year on campus are Staff Development Days and Opening Day, when she gets to see colleagues she doesn’t normally interact with.
“It’s nice to connect with everybody, and I really like that the school provides that time for staff and faculty to do some professional development,” she said.
Laura is always learning something new and meeting new folks across the college. She participated in the Broadening Understanding, Intercultural Leadership and Development (B.U.I.L.D.) program two years ago, has attended the Northwest Regional Equity Conference numerous times, and regularly attends Clark’s Power, Privilege, and Inequity training sessions.
It’s no surprise that her creative instincts follow Laura home. She’s a crafter who taught herself how to crochet and has created a literary-themed blanket. She’s also a devoted Disney fan who has visited the parks every year for the past five years and makes her own Mickey ears for each trip.
When she’s not crafting or spending time with her family — including her 17-year-old cat — Laura loves to travel. Her next big destination is Japan, where she was born and hasn’t returned since she was two years old.
Her days are spent solving problems of all kinds, and Laura seems to have found a simple formula for doing it well: stay curious, bring people together, and don’t be afraid to ask:
“Is there a better way?”
Pictured: Laura's crocheted book blanket — each square is based on a book she read
while making it.
Pictured: Laura's 17-year-old cat, Bagheera
Pictured: Laura at a recent trip to Disneyland
Photos: Clark College/Jenny Shadley (featured) and Laura Borgman
Story by Malena Goerl, Staff Writer, Communications and Marketing