After attending the 2011 Sloan-C Blended Conference, the Asst. Dean of our College of Graduate and Professional Studies, a Site Director for one of our off campus locations and the Director of Instructional Technology Services, were inspired to take the innovative ideas and practices that we discussed and nurtured at the conference to create a new initiative at our institution. Our journey began with discussions and documentation sessions in the lobby of the Hotel where the 2011 Sloan-C Blended Conference was held, in Chicago, IL. We identified the need to create a structure at our University to thoughtfully empower and support blended and distance learning. While Longwood had created some support years before, we realized at the conference that our preparation and training for blended and online learning was lagging behind what many Sloan-C member-institutions are doing. We had also been tasked with spending a sizable budget on technology equipment and knew that the expense would be wasted if people were not in place to help everyone use it. This division was born out of a common problem across institutions - the notion of investing in technology without the human support and/or structure behind it to make sure technology gets used. To really get quality out of the technology, we must invest in the people who use it. We want to empower others to thoughtfully implement blended and online learning with an emphasis upon application to real goals, as opposed to buying "stuff" with little to no training our understanding of how to use it. And so, the Digital Education Collaborative (DEC) was born. The DEC is a separate division within Longwood University's College of Graduate and Professional Studies, where the Asst. Dean is now the Dean. The Director of ITS is now the Director of Policy and Planning and the Site Director is now the Director of Instruction and Training. All three of us have taken on increased responsibilities as a result of our collaboration at the 2011 Sloan-C Conference in Chicago that we will outline and share in this presentation. We will also share our planning and implementation process, how we built the division with existing resources, the value of purposeful communication and collaboration within an institution, and our goals. We will explain the seven organizational goal areas and corresponding key objectives that guide our division: Policy, Education and Training, Collaboration, Creation (content), Outreach, Quality, and Innovation.