1. The ability to adapt and thrive in the face of challenge. Let’s face it — systems change and transformation is challenging work whether you’re working in one community or scaling what works across a network of nearly 70 communities. Our work requires leaders undaunted by challenging the status quo and changing narratives around economic mobility. We will define how this network holds economic mobility and, importantly, how our work puts young people on the path to economic mobility.

This will include embracing the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty’s definition of economic mobility that goes beyond attaining economic success and speaks to power and autonomy and the feeling of being valued in the community. While we have always focused on improving cradle-to-career outcomes for every child, we have grown to appreciate the power that resides with youth and families marginalized by systems designed to discount them. We can transform these systems to deliver more equitable results by working with youth and families.

2. An explicit focus on racial and ethnic equity. Racial equity is both a value we must deeply live and an outcome we must achieve to realize our vision. We will operationalize the racial and ethnic equity and inclusion that we seek to advance in nearly 70 communities across the country. Meaningful equity work requires not just change but transformation — a thorough shift in organizational practices, norms, culture and composition, from hiring and recruitment to daily management. This work is hard, messy and complex. It requires healing, reconciliation and commitment. Our resolve comes from the simple belief that every child has value and promise.

Leaders must have the courage to disaggregate data to consider race, ethnicity and gender to inform strategies, drive accountability and engage in tough conversations. While talking about race and ethnicity can be emotionally charged, we have to get comfortable having uncomfortable conversations about the systemic racism underpinning the systems we need to transform.

3. A willingness to collaborate with others, importantly the youth and families most impacted by our work. This speaks again to recognizing the power and authority that resides in the community. Leaders must go beyond listening to community members to validate factors and hone strategies. Leaders must work with affected youth and families by bringing them to the table to develop strategies for closing gaps and creating opportunities. We have called out communication and community engagement as one of the critical capacities needed to transform systems, and we will continue to support our network members in their efforts to more authentically engage and activate community in the work.

So, I extend my deepest appreciation and solidarity to leaders across the Cradle to Career Network. Every time you challenge the status quo, have uncomfortable conversations and disrupt systems in your community, you are taking critical steps toward our shared goal of putting every child on a pathway toward success. You are vital to a movement that is impacting the lives of 13 million kids and counting. The road ahead is long, but this Network is unstoppable.

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Here are a few examples of how Thrive Chicago has partnered across the city to change systems:

Supporting youth to connect to opportunities

Thrive uses collective impact to unite partners around supporting youth aged 16-24 who are disconnected from work and school, called opportunity youth.

• Thrive convenes the Opportunity Youth Working Group, which used data to shift the City of Chicago’s understanding of opportunity youth. While the public narrative often associates opportunity youth with violence and men of color with low levels of education, data showed that the majority of Chicago’s opportunity youth have their high school diplomas, and 48% are female.
• This data analysis helped city leaders and practitioners develop recommendations for action, created with input from opportunity youth. The recommendations spurred citywide change, including reallocation of funding, shifts in programming (e.g. programming for high school graduates and women) and a change in how providers and policy makers talk about opportunity youth.
• One recommendations launched neighborhood-based Reconnection Hubs, physical spaces designed to help young people navigate the resources they need to reconnect to the education and workforce systems. These Reconnection Hubs, led by Thrive’s direct service partners, have connected 300 opportunity youth to work or school. The City of Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services initially invested $500,000 to launch the Hubs, which are supported by both public and private funding.

Setting high school graduates up for success

Thrive coordinates efforts to make sure that high school graduates who plan to start college have the support they need to get there.

• Every year, 5,000 high school graduates who intended to go to college do not actually enroll in college in the fall. This is called summer melt. In partnership with Chicago Public Schools and postsecondary support organizations, Thrive Chicago raised funding for and helped support a Summer Transition Coordinator strategy in 55 high schools that had the highest rates of summer melt. Coordinators helped college-bound students navigate hurdles that had the potential to prevent them from making it to their postsecondary institutions.
• After implementing the Summer Transition Coordinator strategy, 1,000 more students successfully started college. The strategy is now integrated into Chicago Public Schools’ broader postsecondary enrollment plan, with funding designated to support it.

In its work to support young people to succeed in school and beyond, Thrive Chicago has put youth at the center, working across the city to change systems. Congratulations to Thrive Chicago for reaching the proof point designation!

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Boston Opportunity Agenda supports community partners across Boston to change systems for youth. Now, the Cradle to Career Network member is one of 15 communities to reach an important milestone along the StriveTogether Theory of Action, earning the designation of proof point. Here are a few examples of how Boston Opportunity Agenda has influenced the way the system operates in Boston:

Aligning on a shared vision

• With leaders from workforce development, education, philanthropy and more, Boston Opportunity Agenda developed a common definition of college, career and life readiness. Boston Public Schools is adopting the definition and is using it to make decisions, a constant even in leadership transition following a change in superintendents.
• Organizations across Boston are using the same set of measures and tools to improve outcomes for youth. The Summer Learning Community or Fifth Quarter collaborative began as a small set of funded organizations serving 232 youth but has grown in breadth and depth to a network of over 160 organizations serving over 14,000 young people.

Using data to create strategies

• Success Boston and the Summer Learning Community have seen population-level changes in their outcomes as a result of the improvements made using student-level data year over year. The work of Success Boston, the partnership’s postsecondary attainment collaborative action network, has resulted in increases in persistence, performance and progress as well as increasing the regional completion rate from 39% to 52%. These results were achieved while increasing the number of students completing high school and enrolling in postsecondary education.
• Boston After School and Beyond and Boston Public Schools developed a data sharing agreement for their collaboration, integrated with the academic school year system to allow the district and partners to track growth over the course of the entire calendar year.
• At Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College, data showed that Black and Latinx males had the lowest completion rates. The administration is now focusing on system changes to improve college completion and address that disparity. Partners are acting on this data as well. A coaching model being expanded through Boston’s Lumina Talent Hubs initiative now requires that young men of color comprise 40% of the coaching caseload. The Talent Hubs Initiative also set goals for the effort that are broken down by race.

Engaging the community

• There is a clear model for local collaboration in Boston. Every action network relies on youth and family voice. Some of the strategies employed by the partnership include family engagement committees with parents and parent coordinators, parent representation at leadership tables, employing youth to gather feedback from their peers, and a student advisory council that gathers feedback to strengthen policies and practices.
• Danubia Camargos Silva, a family engagement partner, shared, “When I first started engaging with Boston Opportunity Agenda, it meant a lot that the issues I raised as the only parent in the room were taken up by the partners. They went back and took a look at the things I said. They took it very seriously and I felt that I was heard. Today, three years later, I can see for the first time on the BOA report, family engagement is an indicator. That is big. They are shining a light on family engagement that was never there before.”

Investing in what works

Across Boston, public and private funding investments advance practices that work to improve outcomes for students.

• Boston Public Schools invested $3.2 million for the Fifth Quarter summer learning initiative.
• University of Massachusetts Boston and Bunker Hill Community College have implemented the navigation coaching pioneered by Success Boston, reaching all incoming freshmen.
• Funding from the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development is expanding on the lessons learned from the Connection Center pilot, connecting youth with postsecondary education programs, workforce development and employment.

Boston Opportunity Agenda’s work shows how policies, relationships, resources and power structure can shift to support students and families of color and those in low-income households. StriveTogether is excited to celebrate the community’s milestone of achieving the proof point designation.

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Guest post by Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for public interest technology and local initiatives at New America

One of the many lessons I learned working for President Obama comes from his insistence that cynicism is one of the biggest threats our democracy faces. We believe that the system is broken so we back away, taking our hands off of the very levers that give us the capacity to make the changes that we seek.

There may be plenty of reason for cynicism in these challenging times. But there is also plenty of reason for hope, especially if you turn your head away from the dysfunction in Washington and focus on what good people are doing all over the country to address our public problems.

Those problems are grave indeed. Recent studies from Raj Chetty’s team at Harvard tell us that 70% of Americans born in the lowest income quintile will never reach the middle class, and that African American, Latinx and Indigenous children are more likely to experience downward mobility than their white peers. Too often, solutions aimed at young people focus on only one stage of a child’s education — such as early childhood, K-12 and higher education — at the expense of their broader life experience.

But there are promising signs that skillful hands and hearts are using data and other innovative tools to drive impact in small towns and big cities across the country. For example, StriveTogether, a national network committed to supporting the success of every child, offers a framework that is generating impressive impact in nearly 70 communities. In Memphis, Tennessee, a StriveTogether community partner worked with other nonprofits and a local children’s hospital to expand the Parent as Teachers program using an evidence-based curriculum to empower parents and connect families with community resources. Early results indicate that enrollment in home visiting programs has already increased by 9%. They also recently scored a policy win by making the case to city and county government to collaboratively invest $11 million to provide about 1,400 4-year-olds living in poverty access to full-day pre-K. The approved legislation also commits to expanding the program to full enrollment over the next two years, for a total investment of $40 million.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, nonprofit leaders, teachers, business owners and other community members gathered to tackle chronic absences among students at eight local elementary schools — the success has been remarkable. In one school, absence rates dropped from 16% to 2% among a group of chronically absent first-graders over a 10-month period of targeted interventions. At another school, 7% of special education students tested above reading benchmarks — a new high. This StriveTogether community is also advocating for public policy change, which has resulted in some important strides forward for early childhood funding, including the creation of the Governor’s Early Childhood Commission.

StriveTogether’s collective impact approach is already impacting the lives of 13.7 million youth across the nation — 8.6 million of whom are children of color. In the last year alone, 59% of their partnerships reported successes in three out of the six outcomes they measure for improvement, which include kindergarten readiness; early-grade reading and middle-grade math; high school graduation; postsecondary enrollment; and postsecondary completion to getting a good job that provides economic mobility.

These successful practices offer proof that we have the tools available to solve big challenges if we use them wisely and dare to measure our results. The next big challenge is to bring these changes to scale, which will take innovative new public policies. It’s not enough to increase the number of people who get to college in a single community; we need to replicate this success throughout the country. That means translating lessons learned from these localized experiences into policies to benefit children everywhere.

I say this as a policymaker — government doesn’t have to be broken. It can deliver the results it was designed to deliver. Good people with great ideas are making it happen locally, and there’s no reason that it can’t happen at a national scale. We don’t need Washington to give us the answers; our communities already have them. We should bring those ideas to our policymakers rather than the other way around. All we need to achieve collective impact are some proven strategies and the desire to make a difference in the lives of our kids.

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Why does the count matter for nonprofits and those they serve?

An undercount of African American residents in the upcoming census could mean a loss of representation and funding, including one to two congressional seats; about $1.2 billion in federal funding over 10 years; at least $12,000 to $15,000 per decade in Health and Human Services funding along for each uncounted person; and diminished availability of funds for nonprofits. Public infrastructure is also determined by census numbers. Governments and business use the data to determine where to locate schools, transit and retail outlet for communities.

To ensure all are counted and receive their fair share of economic resources, political representation and social services, three key takeaways emerged from the Chicago Urban League event.

Understand who is excluded/undercounted and the barriers that uniquely impact that group. “Sadly, of the top 10 cities with the highest of number of African Americans, Chicago ranks number 2 in percentage of African American in Hard to Count populations,” shared Butler. In addition to certain African American communities, Hard to Count populations include young children, rural residents, other communities of color, immigrants, individuals experiencing homelessness and others. Many of these communities are undercounted for multiple reasons, such as living in housing units not on the Census Bureau’s Master Address File, living in a multi-unit building or in complex households, moving frequently and experiencing language barriers.

Specific attitudinal barriers such as distrust, apathy and privacy concerns were also discussed as reasons African American communities in Chicago are undercounted.  Kareem shared, “While there is apprehension among African American communities regarding census data, how it will be used, who will have access to it and concerns about the privacy of sensitive information, it is important to recognize that the degree of these barriers might be different across communities. African American communities in Chicago are not monolithic.”

Nonprofit representatives during the session recommend creating a community culture assessment or using an existing community assessment tool to uncover the unique barriers that impact different neighborhoods.

Create solutions that directly address the barriers unique to that community or neighborhood. Personalizing messages based on Hard to Count population type is critical. Those who have completed the census before might need to be re-oriented to or re-educated about the process. Others who are unfamiliar with the new process of completing the census through mail and online might respond to social media messaging.

“It is important to meet people where they are and talk specifically about what the census is, how to complete it and the ways the census data will impact their lives. We need to give each group that comes through our organization targeted and tangible examples of where the benefits of being counted show up and talk to them in a way that resonates with what they are going through,” shared Angela Brown, Sinai Community Institute’s system director. Brown works with seniors on Chicago’s West Side and stressed the importance of framing the conversation around census data on matters that impact seniors, particularly their concerns around Medicaid.

Where a message on Medicaid benefits might land well with senior populations, other populations will respond to different priorities. For example, the 18-25-year-old African American male population includes residents who may have had higher levels of contact with the criminal justice system or are apathetic about the census process and see it as pointless. This group might need tangible examples of how being counted benefits programs that support individuals who were recently incarcerated.

Champion the role that nonprofits can play in a fair and accurate count. Whether nonprofits are framing the message of the 2020 census as active empowerment and “claiming resources and representation that belong to the people,” or resistance to “negative rhetoric around immigration and communities of color coming from the current White House administration,” they are well positioned in communities with Hard to Count populations. As a low-cost measure, no new program needs to be developed, considering the everyday contact nonprofits have with communities most at risk of being undercounted. According to the Nonprofit Vote, “Those nonprofits, who have already established relationship with the communities they serve, can act as a powerful vehicle for education about the importance of the census. When the message to be counted comes from a trusted entity, people are more likely to participate.”

The 2020 census is around the corner. As part of the nonprofit community, the Cradle to Career Network has an “inherent interest in ensuring that our communities have access” to economic resources, political representation and social services impacted by the census. Consider how you can use your position as a trusted entity in the community to ensure everyone is counted!

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— Stacey Abrams, activist, author and civil rights leader

Reflecting on the recent 10th annual Cradle to Career Network Convening, I am more convinced than ever that we are truly unstoppable when we unite for kids and families. Together, we are a national movement impacting 13.7 million youth and counting, fueled by a shared belief that we can — and should — do better for every child. We saw that in the results and progress shared from across the Network on the plenary stage and in workshop and session rooms.

We celebrated and shared some incredible work and impact nationally, including:

• Our 2019 Cradle to Career Champion and a new honor — the Courage in Leadership Award! Let’s congratulate again Susan Dawson, founder, president and executive director of network member E3 Alliance in Central Texas; and ROC the Future, a network member in Rochester, N.Y., and the recipient of our first Nancy Zimpher Courage in Leadership Award.
• Validation that our rigorous approach to quality collective impact produces better results for kids and families. These fantastic findings about the StriveTogether Theory of Action are summarized in this recent Stanford Social Innovation Review piece.
• More network members are advocating, mobilizing and influencing public policy to better serve youth and families. As one example, in New Mexico, Mission: Graduate scored a major legislative victory to curb student absences and improve school climate.
• Three more communities have reached the Proof Point designation: Promise Partnership of Salt Lake in Salt Lake, Utah; Northfield Promise in Northfield, Minn.; and UP Partnership in San Antonio, Texas.

If you are among the 500-plus changemakers who gathered with us in Washington, D.C., I hope you too spent time asking yourself how to better support the success of every child, particularly those facing the most barriers. As I said during the opening plenary, so many of today’s systems perpetuate inequities in the lives of black and brown kids. These are the systems we must transform.

And that work is no easy feat — it’s hard, challenging, messy and exhausting. We need a way to feel rejuvenated, and I think we have plenty of inspiration for the next 12 months from this year’s amazing lineup of keynote speakers including Stacey Abrams, David Brooks, Cecilia Muñoz, Richard Reeves and David Williams.

Here are some key takeaways that emerged from our plenaries:

• “Other people have to see themselves in our story. You have to be willing to create space for other people’s goals to join yours. That’s what makes it collective and that’s what creates real impact.” — Stacy Abrams, activist, author and civil rights leader
• “The data is so important, but data only tells you about the whole population. It doesn’t tell you about the young man or woman sitting in front of you.” — David Brooks, The New York Times
• “Doing, as important as it is, isn’t enough. To get to scale, we have to translate learning to policy so that it can happen everywhere.” — Cecilia Muñoz, New America
• “Evaluation is key. We have to move from policy-based evidence making to evidence-based policymaking.” — Richard Reeves, Brookings Institution
• “How do we take this research and empower folks on the ground? More importantly, how do we get on the ground to understand what the real questions are?” — David Williams, Opportunity Insights

Developing a culture of continuous improvement is one of our core principles — we try to model this annually when we make adjustments to the convening. Last year, we heard a resounding call to continue to center equity in our work.

We shared the work of the Racial Equity Planning Team for network member feedback, including our first racial equity statement. A number of people talked to a TEGA (Technology Enabled Girl Ambassador) about the statement and gave us valuable input. StriveTogether will soon have a racial equity statement to guide our work and we look forward to sharing it.

Recognizing the importance of peer-to-peer learning, we launched a new partner portal! This platform makes it easy to find what you need and connect with other network members. Over 100 people representing 51 partnerships have already logged on to the new portal!

I feel so proud and fortunate to be working in community with thousands of people across the country, breaking down barriers and building better futures for kids and families. But as much progress as we’ve made, we have more work to do to ensure 24 communities reach systems transformation by 2023. I am more confident than ever that we will achieve this goal through the unwavering commitment and unmatched efforts of everyone in the Network.

Thank you to everyone who joined in D.C. or watched our plenaries via livestream (that was new this year!). We know success in this work is possible because we are unstoppable together. As you find better ways to help every child thrive, I charge you to continue lifting up the voices and expertise of young people and to learn what success means to them.

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Last summer, Brooks toured the country, visiting communities enriched by what he calls “weavers” — individuals and organizations creating trusting relationships to repair the frayed social fabric seen in the ways we ignore our neighbors or separate ourselves by our differences.

Collective impact aims to strengthen this fabric. Brooks got his first look at the StriveTogether brand of collective impact when visiting the Spartanburg Academic Movement, where he was touched by the way community-based partnerships were connected to serve the community’s children. He chronicled his discovery in a column aptly titled “A really good thing happening in America.”

At the convening, Brooks pulled forward his experience in South Carolina in his remarks and the panel discussion that followed. The panel was moderated by Jim Shelton, the former deputy secretary of education who coined the Cradle to Career Network’s term “proof point.” Shelton opened with a line from the column that crystalized one Brooks’ primary lessons from his Spartanburg visit: “Trust is built and the social fabric is repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks.”

One by one, panelists described the examples of weavers working on these tasks in each of their communities:

• For Abdi Iftin and Amy Tehrens Terpstra at United Way of Salt Lake, weavers are the 565 volunteers in the community who donated school supplies for students, and the young people who work as grassroots connectors for parents and families across a range of immigrant experiences.
• Keith Lovelace of New York City’s Community School 61 and Michael Partis of South Bronx Rising Together spoke of the elders who make multiple visits to schools each week to read to students, alongside former students who return as volunteers.
• Elyse Peters and Shardé Oliver at Bold Goals Coalition of Central Alabama described how colleagues in rural Alabama build trust by sharing their local context, weaving partners into the community fabric.

These and other examples shared illustrate communities creating connections through meaningful relationships and appreciation of place. Such stories of relationships can often be overshadowed by leaders’ drive to achieve results. Brooks reminded audience members that as they navigate challenges back home, it is their relationships that will sustain the work. Relationship building is a skill, Brooks said.

“We all say we want to be good at relationship, but the people who are really good at it have gone through some sort of metamorphosis,” he shared.

This metamorphosis is a narrative that Brooks has experienced in his own life, which he explained using StriveTogether’s name. Of the words “Strive” and “Together,” Brooks says he’s always been better at the first. He was a striver from an early age who chose his profession of writing after reading about Paddington Bear as a child. His journalism studies have led him to a career of achievement, with multiple books and a regular column in one of the country’s most prominent periodicals. But as his career progressed, Brooks found himself mostly alone, falling into a personal valley caused by a “lack of togetherness.” His charge to the audience was to remember the second part of StriveTogether’s name.

As an organization, StriveTogether too has seen metamorphosis, beginning as a network of like-minded partnerships creating collective impact in more than 100 communities. After an update to our theory of action added rigor to our framework, many communities left the Cradle to Career Network. Since then, the network has strived plenty, with a total of 13 proof point communities and an ambitious goal of 24 communities reaching systems transformation by 2023. But deep in the data lies something else — the strength of the community connectivity that has made it all possible.

Today, nearly 70 StriveTogether network members nationwide are creating relationships across sector, across difference and across the railroad tracks with a deep commitment to equity and closing disparities. As collective impact leaders, we are relationship builders first, and as we continue to learn and grow as a network, we take a note from David Brooks, who, as Jim Shelton noted, has not only the courage to change, but the courage to do it in public. And if individuals can change, culture can change, systems can change, and we can all keep striving — together.

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Even before Abrams set foot in the jam-packed ballroom at the 2019 StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network Convening in Washington, D.C., the crowd was already cheering for her arrival and ready to learn from her experiences.

As she shared stories of her own childhood in Mississippi and how her parents grew up, Abrams underlined the importance of public education and the ecosystem of supports that are necessary to lift people to their full potential — from strong, supportive mentors and family members to food security, housing, health care and basic needs like clean clothes.

Her lessons on leadership were not just inspiring, but they resonated with the work of network members in communities across the nation. Here are a few of her motivating insights:

Find places of common cause to get things done

Lesson #1: “Ideology is not the same as intention.” Abrams shared stories of not settling for just fighting back against a bad bill but working with legislators across the aisle to find solutions, because she wasn’t going to be blinded by ideology but instead stayed focused on results. The difference between ideology and intention is an important message for anyone working across sectors to achieve better, more equitable results.

“I don’t believe in conversion,” she said. “I don’t try to make them agree with me. I try to find places of common cause where you can make advances. I believe in incrementalism. You’re not going to get everything you want at once, but you can get more of what you need the longer you’re willing to work at it.”

As our cradle-to-career partnerships work to transform systems, a focus on changing mindsets, beliefs and mental models can yield long-lasting impact, but it can’t happen overnight. Instead of focusing solely on changing hearts and minds, our communities can — and are — changing systems: changing policies, shifting funding and disrupting power structures.

Speak the whole truth

Lesson #2: “Transparency is essential to transformation.” Abrams encouraged us to be willing to admit our mistakes, own our responsibility in our successes and our failures, and hold ourselves accountable by measuring ourselves against real numbers.

Public accountability is no stranger to the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network. As Abrams said, “Collective impact partnerships have at their core the notion we are in this together and the work that has to be done has to make certain that everyone has a stake.” To help everyone to truly own their role, our cradle-to-career partnerships use data as a flashlight to illuminate gaps and mobilize people into action to create opportunities for kids of color and kids from low-income families.

Her push to be vulnerable and admit our failures and mistakes is critical. We have to be more willing to admit our shortcomings and invite others in to help find solutions. StriveTogether’s own racial equity journey is a powerful example of learning from failure and not allowing that failure to be fatal, but rather to use stumbles as lessons for improvement.

Lift up unexpected voices and show up

Lesson #3: “Lead from the outside.” Abrams has written a whole book about this, and her invitation to leaders to bring unexpected voices to the table was met with loud applause. “If you want to know how to help a struggling child, talk to a struggling child,” she said. “When we’re willing to work not with community, but in community, that’s when transformation is real.”

Her wisdom on how to influence policymakers is timely as our Network is seeing more policy wins and as we enter yet another election cycle. “Politicians respond to three things: money, peer pressure and attention,” Abrams said. As advocates, we have a responsibility to show up in the places where politicians are in public and explain the problems we’re facing through data and stories, explaining why these challenges are problems and being clear about the solutions.

As communities work to change power dynamics in communities and empower youth and families to determine their own destinies, take stock of what Abrams shared: “People do not cede power. You take it. You can’t wait for people to cede power. Power is seductive and attractive. … It’s not about getting them to cede power; it’s making sure they understand it’s not their power to hold.”

What’s next?

Abrams describes herself as a meliorist — not an optimist or a pessimist, but someone who believes that the world can be made better by human effort. Our job, she says, is to believe in possibilities and find antidotes. As unstoppable changemakers, all of us have an obligation to find common cause to get things done, speak the whole truth and lift up unexpected voices. We have to take bolder swings at policy change and learn in public.

And some of us — I’m looking at you, fellow women and people of color — need to run for something.

The post Creating possibilities with outsider leadership: Lessons from Stacey Abrams appeared first on StriveTogether.

On stage at the 2019 Cradle to Career Network Convening sits a panel of leaders from network communities celebrating recent policy successes. Joining them is Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for public interest technology and local initiatives at New America and a former senior staff member in the Obama administration. The panelists’ composure and passion carries the weight of distinctive expertise, yet on this stage, the prevailing narrative seems remarkably simple: Effective policy change, as convoluted and overwhelming as it can seem, can be achieved through a strategic blending of common sense and practical problem solving with communities. 

This simplistic perspective is groundbreaking in a time when policy work is hard to conceptualize. Moderated by StriveTogether’s own senior manager of policy and partnerships, Christian Motley, this panel of network members from Kentucky (Partners for Education at Berea College), Texas (The Commit Partnership) and New Mexico (Mission: Graduate) shared that to achieve policy wins, you don’t necessarily have to be a political expert.

Policy change as continuous improvement
Before the panel, in her opening statement, Muñoz introduced something she calls “the new practice of public problem solving.” This concept builds on the idea that the traditional way of working in policy is inefficient and, ultimately, too distant from those it claims to help. 

In this new practice of policy, problem solving must exhibit these four characteristics:

1. People-centered: It puts people with needs and capabilities at the center of programs and policies using human-centered design.
2. Experimental: It starts small and scouts for local solutions, testing ideas and concepts before spreading them nationally.
3. Data-enabled: It leverages big data and small data to access problems, monitor progress and evaluate what works. 
4. Designed to scale: It includes a plan for how to expand and react when scaled

After listing these elements, Muñoz pauses, looking out into the convening audience with a knowing smile. “Sound familiar?” she asks. It does, demonstrated by how the room fills with laughter and head nods. The new practice of public problem solving is similar to the iterative build of the StriveTogether continuous improvement method that network members use to get better results for children and families. 

Continuous improvement is the common thread through the panel’s experiences, from the success shared by Sagar Desai from The Commit Partnership of securing over $6.5 billion in education funding, to the work described by Angelo Gonzales from Mission: Graduate to introduce a competition model for school funding that aligns with closing disparity gaps.

Policy change as systems change
Around the room, convening participants lean forward in genuine engagement with the panel, but some have looks of slight skepticism. It’s as if they wonder, “If policy change is continuous improvement, what is the point of doing both? Aren’t strategies enough for real change?” Sensing this curiosity, Muñoz continues discussing the current progress of network members working to close disparity gaps. 

“The doing is not enough,” she says. “In order to get to scale, you have to make policy to bring innovation to policy making. As important as it is to improve outcomes in communities, we cannot be done if we are not accomplishing this, for one county or even a whole state.” Shifting from doing to policy making is the heart of the difference between temporary fixes and lasting systems shifts.

Policy changers as strategic empathizers
To achieve policy wins, listening is as important as speaking, according to the panelists. Build connections to turn opposers into allies rather than writing people off because of differences. In Berea, Kentucky, Dreama Gentry says, work is underway to help policy makers listen to the needs of rural communities and to support community members to become local policy makers themselves. 

Muñoz reminds the audience that at the end of the day, we are all “innovators and problem solvers and good neighbors.” Yes, she’s referring to all policymakers — even those we disagree with. The challenge is to work together toward results for children and families. 

“At the end of the day, everybody is human and they come in the room with interests, loyalties and mental models,” Motley says. He suggests understanding who you’re working with before the conversation begins, so you’re ready to leverage their passions for the results you seek. Using metrics, data, common sense and process design to understand a problem really well to drive for solutions is what policy work is all about. The good news is that the Cradle to Career Network is full of innovators with the tools needed to engage policy work across the country. These tools are common sense, ingenuity and a community full of others who desire success for their children. 

As a policy maker, Muñoz has seen innovators in action time and time again. As the panel closes and she looks out at the room of over 500 leaders engaged in this work, she shares words of encouragement: “Change is possible. We can do this, and the reason I know this is because you’re already doing it, every day.”

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Hearing all of these individual aspirations begs an important question: How do we know if we’re making progress as a system, as a society, in ensuring the success of every child toward economic mobility? At the opening plenary of the Cradle to Career Network Convening, network members heard from two experts on the state of opportunity in America: Richard Reeves, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and David Williams, policy director at Opportunity Insights.

Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

“The myth of meritocracy”

Reeves shared a stark perspective on the class system in the U.S. and, as he described it, “the myth of meritocracy.” This myth camouflages the structural inequities of our economic system. As Reeves described the “ruthless machine” of the American class system that produces economic inequity across our country, I was reminded of the idea that there is no such thing as a broken system — all systems are perfectly designed to produce the outcomes they achieve.

Race and place matter.

If you’re black and were born into bottom 20% of the economic ladder, you have a 50% chance of staying there, while white Americans born into same quintile are half as likely to stay. In addition to race, as many of us have suspected, place matters, too. Reeves described this as “the Baltimore effect,” explaining that if you grew up in Baltimore, controlling for all other factors possible, you’re likely to earn 15% less over your lifetime than the average American. This impact is even more pronounced for boys.

Data from Raj Chetty and Opportunity Insights shows the impact of the place where you grow up. While this insight represents a huge shift in social science, we still don’t understand the “what” or “why” of how place affects outcomes. I believe Cradle to Career Network members are ready to dig into the data and answer these questions for their own communities.

Investigate the factors specific to the neighborhoods that have provided opportunity in your community. What are the challenges and what have been the bright spots in those neighborhoods?

Disrupting education inequality

Reeves highlighted that education inequality is passed on even more strongly than wealth. Standardized tests like the SAT are often used to perpetuate these inequities over generations. We as a network have an opportunity to identify equitable system measures — like equitable funding flows, diversity of the educator workforce and more — to measure not only child-level outcomes but system performance to address disrupt this accrual of privilege over time.

Our work must involve elevating the human capital in the education and economic mobility space and ensuring that talent is representative of the communities we seek to serve. Watch how Cradle to Career Network members Generation Next and Milwaukee Succeeds are collaborating with partners to take on this challenge:

Measuring effective solutions

Put simply, there is NO correlation between employment growth and economic mobility. In fact, in places like Charlotte, N.C., economic growth is actually exacerbating mobility challenges. You simply can’t count on job growth to drive economic mobility.

So, what does work? One proven solution is supporting and expanding integrated early childhood systems that include evidence-based home visitation support. Learn how Cradle to Career Network member Norwalk ACTS is supporting this effort:

So, what does this mean for the work of our movement?

Put eloquently by David Williams, “StriveTogether partnerships are uniquely positioned to build the political will to operationalize these research insights into action.”

Here are some ways we can work toward sharing the American Dream:

• Define your success metrics very clearly.
• Start with the evidence. What promotes mobility at different stages of the cradle-to- career continuum?
• Measure and evaluate progress so you can make informed adjustments and improve over time.
• Engage with housing partners to improve housing opportunities, which impact many other factors.
• Use the Opportunity Insights’ Opportunity Atlas to dig into the data in YOUR community and target your work to local issues for those marginalized by systems and structures.

We, as a movement, have an opportunity to measure and demonstrate what works for kids and families. Across the country, people are eager for solutions, and we can provide them.

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