Striving Together

Nancy L. Zimpher, Jeff Edmondson

Description

In 2006, Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky had been suffering from many of the same challenges facing metro regions across the country. Despite significant investments in education from the public and private sectors, outcomes were alarming: Kindergarten readiness was below fifty percent, and nearly half of the students in the Cincinnati Public Schools were dropping out before high school graduation. Fortunately, a diverse group of community leaders across sectors was exploring a transformative approach to improving education as a system. This gathering of leaders was the genesis of the StrivePartnership, which served as the inspiration for the theory of collective impact. Together, these partners are building a cradle-to-career civic infrastructure based on the idea that everyone in a community has a stake in the success of every child.

This book chronicles the early stages of this ongoing journey from the perspective of the founding chair and director of this work, drawing upon lessons from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky and four other pioneering local partnerships. The experiences captured in these five regions helped lay the foundation for the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network, a national community of practice on the cutting edge of social change.
Foreword by Ben Hecht
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. Origins and Organizational Development

1. A Cincinnati Story

2. Paving the Way for Quality Replication: A Framework for Cradle-to-Career Civic Infrastructure

3. Striving the Quality and Commitment: A Theory of Action

Part II. Cradle-to-Career Case Studies

4. Portland: All Hands Raised

5. Bridging Richmond

6. Seattle/South King County: The Road Map Project

7. Houston: All Kids Alliance

Part III. Creating a Community of Practice

8. Lessons from Winning Big and Failing Forward

9. Striving Together: Critical Next Steps

Appendix A: Funding to Support the Backbone Entity in Collective Impact Efforts
Appendix B: Published Reports That Discuss the StrivePartnership and StriveTogether
Appendix C: Additional Resources
Appendix D: StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network Members

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Education

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456065
• Langue: English

Extrait

Striving Together
Striving Together
Early Lessons in Achieving Collective Impact in Education
Jeff Edmondson
and
Nancy L. Zimpher
Foreword by
Ben Hecht
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Ryan Morris
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Striving Together: Early Lessons in Achieving Collective Impact in Education / Jeff Edmondson, Nancy L. Zimpher; foreword by Ben Hecht.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5605-8 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5604-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
E-ISBN 978-1-4384-5606-5 (ebook)
2014941976
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Jeff:
To Kelly and my kids, Emmy, Isabel, Alex, and Maddie.
Your constant love and support—
particularly your patience when I am on the road—
has sustained me every step of the way on this ongoing journey.
Nancy:
To children and grandchildren everywhere,
whose collective future is at the center of this work.
Contents
Foreword by Ben Hecht
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Origins and Organizational Development
Chapter 1. A Cincinnati Story
Chapter 2. Paving the Way for Quality Replication: A Framework for Cradle-to-Career Civic Infrastructure
Chapter 3. Striving for Quality and Commitment: A Theory of Action
Part II. Cradle-to-Career Case Studies
Chapter 4. Portland: All Hands Raised
Chapter 5. Bridging Richmond
Chapter 6. Seattle/South King County: The Road Map Project
Chapter 7. Houston: All Kids Alliance
Part III. Creating a Community of Practice
Chapter 8. Lessons from Winning Big and Failing Forward
Chapter 9. Striving Together: Critical Next Steps
Appendix A Funding to Support the Backbone Entity in Collective Impact Efforts
Appendix B Published Reports That Discuss the StrivePartnership and StriveTogether
Appendix C Additional Resources
Appendix D StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network Members
Notes
Index
Foreword
Ben Hecht
In July 2007, I was invited by the Brookings Institution to attend the Global Urban Summit, held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s conference center on Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy. At the time, I was about to start a new job as president and CEO of Living Cities, a philanthropic collaborative of 22 foundations and financial institutions dedicated to bringing about transformational change for low-income urban Americans. I looked forward to connecting with leaders doing groundbreaking work in urban settings, in large part because I was in the market for ideas with the potential to improve the lives of millions of Americans.
I had been working in the social change field for more than 20 years, in several different capacities and sectors: higher education, nonprofit, and philanthropic. I had seen many great individual programs and worked with amazing, charismatic leaders, public and private. What I hadn’t seen, however, was needle-moving impact: millions of lives changed, not just thousands. I had come to realize that innovative programs, no matter how effective, could never overcome dysfunctional systems. If we didn’t attack and fundamentally change the systems, then we would never get desired and sustained results.
There were indeed many innovative organizations and ideas represented at the Brookings convening. But one leader arrived in Bellagio armed with a vision—and a project on the ground—that felt suspiciously like the transformative approach to systems change I had been seeking.
That leader was University of Cincinnati president Nancy Zimpher, and her initiative was the StrivePartnership.
When Nancy told me about an effort in Cincinnati that she was a part of to transform educational outcomes, not just fix an underperforming program, I was intrigued. When she told me that the effort was being led by all the people who were running and funding the current dysfunctional system, I knew this had a real chance to be something important.
As she described the work, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit in Nancy. We shared a passion for systemic change and an understanding that unless we radically reform the way we deliver services, we won’t get the job done. Like me, she was committed to dramatically picking up the pace and scale of positive social change.
As Nancy told me about this new cross-sector collaborative, we were looking over one of the most scenic views in the world. But later that evening in my hotel, as I read more about the StrivePartnership, the ideas and process were just as compelling, even without the spectacular backdrop.
What I read confirmed my gut reaction: That it represented an unprecedented opportunity to tear down the silos where organizations get fixated on one aspect of a problem rather than working systemically. Moreover, this new configuration of leaders seemed to be creating just the type of new civic infrastructure that communities needed to keep the right people at the right table long enough to make a difference.
After Bellagio, when Living Cities staff traveled to Cincinnati and experienced the StrivePartnership leadership table firsthand, we had even more enthusiasm about supporting the effort. We wanted to help solidify the Framework and increase the chances that it could be adopted and adapted anywhere in the country.
What set this effort apart, from Living Cities’ perspective, was the way that the table had been set with leaders who were willing to use their actual and implied authority as well as their political capital to get the work done. The participants had also agreed on the specific outcomes they wanted to change, and they had committed to using data to measure their progress, to hold themselves accountable.
And their core of chief executive-level leaders positioned them for success: Alongside Nancy Zimpher were KnowledgeWorks Foundation CEO Chad Wick, Greater Cincinnati Foundation CEO Kathy Merchant, and local United Way president Rob Reifsnyder. The team’s magical synergy of complementary skills and networks allowed them to recruit others through an unlikely combination of audacity, humility, and transparency.
Living Cities decided to invest, first with seed money to Knowledge-Works Foundation to begin distilling the approach into a framework that others could emulate, followed by a grant competition for communities to pilot the Framework. Through the grant we funded five sites, four of which are profiled in this book.
One of the biggest wins with the StriveTogether Framework was that it ultimately took very little money to begin scaling up. I believe this is because of the power of the idea, and a growing hunger and urgency among leaders across the country to break the stagnation. This, in combination with effective use of social media, helped bring about a remarkable explosion in interest and participation on a national level.
Of course, none of this scale-up would have been possible without the dogged determination and articulate vision embodied by Jeff Edmondson. As executive director of the original StrivePartnership of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky, and now StriveTogether’s managing director, Jeff has been a charismatic spokesman for this work. His commitment to cultivating the strength of the network and the rigor of its collective impact approach has been extraordinarily effective.
Nancy has continued to be a driving force in what we now call Strive-Together. As chancellor of the State University of New York’s 64-campus system, she has been a champion and a sponsor of cradle-to-career networks on the local, state, and national levels.
Living Cities has not only invested in the scaling and development of the StriveTogether Framework; we have incorporated it into our work in every programmatic area, focusing on three critical elements: shared vision, articulated metrics, and a cross-sector table of executives who use data on progress to hold themselves and each other accountable. The Framework has served as a powerful structure for our Integration Initiative, which is supporting five cities to engage in a range of system-level changes that benefit low-income people.
As both a participant and an observer in the networks and replication that is taking place across the nation, I believe we are in the midst of a pivotal moment in which collaboration is becoming the new competition. Every day I encounter more leaders who understand the power and efficacy of these collaboratives and want to be a part of them.
StriveTogether’s pioneering genius played a central role in this culture shift, and I could not be more proud to be a part of it.
We are still far from declaring victory on our goals of social and economic equity. But the rapid spread of this transformative way of doing business extends a singularly bright and hopeful light to the world, and the experiences detailed in these pages offer an indispensable blueprint for those ready to join this cultural vanguard. In my view, StriveTogether’s cradle-to-career Framework is, hands down, our best bet to build